TWD: Fresh Mango Bread Muffins with Pecans and Coconut

After missing out on all last weeks challenges I really looked forward to participating in this weeks TWD as Kelly of Baking with the Boys picked Mango Bread for us to try.



I halved the recipe, used a bit more cinnamon and a bit less ginger. I soaked the raisins in apfelkorn for about 10 minutes and added 1/3 cup of chopped pecans and 2 tablespoons of shredded coconut to the batter to get a more pronounced tropical taste. Then I divided the mixture over some muffin liners and baked them for about 20 minutes. Next time they need a bit less time in the oven as they had a bit too much of a tan on them in my opinion....



This time I forgot to add the lime zest and am afraid that at one point I forgot to half the ingredients: I can clearly remember measuring the whole 1/2 cup of packed light brown sugar and adding it to the rest of the dry ingredients, so I guess my muffins will be a tad sweet this week. I'll get back on the flavour later today after I sampled a muffin! Update: these were absolutely perfect: nice and moist on the inside with an occasional piece of pecan, yum!!

The coconut however was hardly detectable.... Maybe I'll add some more next time!

My halved recipe actually made 24 muffins, it always amazes me when I get way more muffins from one recipe than Americans. I'm not exactly sure what this means... MaybeI'm frugal or American muffins are simply enormous!! Anyhow, one of my muffins contains 3 WW points.

Go check out what my fellow TWD-ers thought of the Mango Bread here!
Great news by the way for those of you who are not members of TWD but want to be: the group's accepting new members!!! If you're interested, go check out the rules here.

TWD Rewind: Brioche Raisin Snails

I know.... I'm a day late posting this, but well.... You're just going to have to forgive me!

Isabelle from Les gourmandises d'Isa hosted TWD this week and picked Arborio Rice Pudding as the recipe for this week. But.... I don't like rice pudding (sorry Isa... :( ) and was also put off by the P&Q's: lots of people seemed to have issues in one way or the other with this recipe. If you would like to try and make it, the recipe can be found here. The results of the other TWD-ers can be found here.

So you may wonder: what did I do if I didn't make the rice pudding? I decided to do a rewind and make the Brioche Raisin Snails: they were picked by Peabody of Culinary Concoctions of Peabody for March 18, 2008. Since I wasn't a member of TWD back then I haven't made these before and had my eye on them since I joined. I will not type over the entire recipe as it can be found here.

The recipe called for 2 packets of dry-active yeast. I had no idea how much grams or teaspoons that would be, but luckily someone asked that question in the P&Q. Thus I found out that 1 packet is 2 1/4 tsp. Instead of the rum called for in this recipe (Peabody used Grand Marnier) I used a cinnamon liquor and I made a plaine glaze instead of Peabody's tangerine glaze. Other than that I followed the recipe exactly.

I loved these!! I will defenitely be making them again, but next time I will pop the in the oven just a bit shorter: I thought they were a bit too brown and prefer them to be more golden and soft.

As for the other half of the dough: I'm keeping that to make the Pecan Honey Sticky buns that were chosen by Madam Chow of Madam Chow's Kitchen for TWD for May 27, 2008. They will be appearing on this blog soon. ;)

P.S. Don't forget to sign up for my first blog give-away!! Deadline is tonight: midnight European time. Sign-up here!!

TWD: Kugelhopf

Another week, another Tuesday: time for sweets!! I must say that Tuesday has become my favourite day of the week since I joined TWD. This week we all baked Kugelhopf (pages 61-63 of Baking: From my Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan). This recipe was picked by Yolanda of The All-Purpose Girl and can be found here.

I started off deciding I would make miniature bundtcakes: I couldn't find a Kugelhopf-pan here Then I used 1/6 cup of raisins and 1/6 cup of cranberries and let them sit in 1/3 cup of cinnamon liquor over night. I also used some cinnamon-sugar I had leftover instead of the regular sugar.

Since I don't own a stand-mixer (still at the top of my wish-list, but I don't Santa will be that generous this year) I had to mix this with my hand-held mixer..... Unfortunately there was no way the dough wanted to climb up the hook...,. After 20 minutes my mixer started to get really warm and I called it quits.

I added the raisins and cranberries to half of the dough and 1/3 cup of mini chocolate chips to the other half. The first rising didn't take long: about 75 minutes instead of the 90 minutes indicated. After deflating the dough I popped them into the fridge overnight.

The second rise only needed about two hours. Then I baked them for 10 minutes, covered them loosely with foil and baked for another ten minutes. They even continued rising while baking.... I must have done something right!!


My kitchen smells delicious: cinnamon is divine to bake with, but so is chocolate!! Yum... Now for the taste of the miniature Kugelhopf..... The chocolate one was a bit dry to my taste and could have used a bit more flavour/sweetnes, but it was still delicious. The raisin/cranberry Kugelhopf was amazing: nice and moist and a hint of cinnamon.


However I don't know if I'll be making Kugelhopf again: I found the whole process to be quite time-consuming! Be sure to check out what the other TWD-ers cooked up this week!!