Wednesday 27 June 2012

Anise muffins with pine nuts

Those moist, chewy, very sweet and licroice flavoured muffins are really good. The addition of anise makes them taste a little bit like licroice and smell very sweet. Anise itself is a herb, it helps children with digestive system problems and is anispetic. 
The recipe comes from 'New Italian cousine. Muffins.' cookbook.

Ingredients for 12-15 muffins:
  • 170g flour
  • 80g wholegrain flour*
  • 2 and 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • pinch of salt
  • 100g pine nuts or chopped  walnuts
  • 2 tsp anise seeds
  • 2 eggs
  • 100g sugar
  • 90 ml canola oil
  • 250 ml milk
* wholegrain flour can be replaced with plain flour

If you use walnuts chop them and set aside.

Preheat the oven to 180C. Line muffin tin with paper cases.

Sift the flours, baking powder, salt into a big bowl and whisk them together. Then add the anise and chosen nuts.

In electric mixer bowl beat the eggs, sugar, oil and milk. Then beating continuosly add, spoon by spoon, the dry ingredients. The batter is going to be runny. With a spoon or better ladel fill muffin cases about 3/4 full. 
Bake for 20 minutes, until toothpic sticked in the middle comes out clean.
Transfer to the wire rack to cool down.

In a meantime prepare the icinng.

Ingredients for icing:
  • 130g icing sugar
  • 3 tbsp lemon juice 
  • 1 tsp anise seeds 
Put the icing sugar, anise and lemon juice into a  bowl and with a spoon stir them together until smooth. Spread ready icing  over each muffin top. It will spread better when muffin are still worm.
You can try to ground the anise seeds into a powder but it is not nessesery. The icing will have cute green spots anyway.



Enjoy !


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