Welcome Back to me!

So, we bought our first house recently, and a little over a week ago we moved in. We are all settled now, and I have no excuse not to blog anymore other than being right out of the habit and not having a lot of spare time.

My last post was about lemons - far too long ago! Well, today it's about grapefruit! I was given a massive box of grapefruit a few weeks ago - bad timing really as it got caught up with the packing and moving. So I have lost several grapefruit to them going bad, but I still have about 20 or so perfectly good ones. Far too many to just eat, so I am playing around with recipes.

Today I bring you muffins as I like muffins - quick and easy, freeze well for school lunches etc. It's a recipe I adapted, the original recipe looked good but it uses the pulp after squeezing the juice, but the grapefruit that I have are full of pips, and well, it would have been one hell of a job to sort through the pulp, so I omitted it. I upped the juice, substituted a few ingredients, added some grapefruit curd, changed a few things, and well yeah, this is the end result!

 

Grapefruit Muffins - makes approx 16 medium muffins

Recipe adapted from South in your Mouth

1 1/4 cups Freshly squeezed grapefruit juice (took me 4 medium grapefruit)
1/2 cup Oats
1/2 cup Coconut
3/4 cup White Sugar
1/3 cup Brown Sugar
2 Eggs
1 1/2 cup White Flour
1 tsp Baking Soda
1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Cinnamon

In a medium size saucepan, bring the juice to the boil. Remove from heat and add the oats and coconut. Sit aside for roughly 20 minutes (I left mine for less, impatient!)

In a large bowl, mix together the remaining ingredients. Add the juice/oat mixture and combine.

Spoon mixture into the muffin tins filling only partway, add a generous dollop of grapefruit curd, then top with the remaining mixture.

Bake at 180*c for roughly 20 minutes

Now, I have just moved house, so my recipes from now on may reflect how long things were baked in my new oven which is fan forced. My old oven wasn't. These took me 20 minutes at 170*c, however I would have baked them at 180 in my old oven, and likely taken longer.

They didn't rise much so are quite flat on top. But overall they taste pretty good and they used up a few grapefruit so that is all good.

 

Now, as I mentioned on my facebook page, I had never tried to make curd before using margarine instead of butter. Well, I tried it with marg in the grapefruit curd, and ya know what? It jolly well worked! Fantastic. Grapefruit curd doesn't taste nearly as nice as lemon curd though! I added a squeeze of lemon juice in there, but next time if I want to use grapefruit in it I think I might do half half with lemon.

Anyways, the recipe:

Grapefruit Curd

(yes this is the same as my lemon curd recipe, just using grapefruit...)

4 eggs

zest of 2 smaller sized grapefruit, finely grated
125ml grapefruit juice, strained (can make that up with part lemon juice too)
150g caster sugar (I just use normal sugar, it's fine)
100g butter (or margarine works fine too)

Lightly beat the eggs and strain through a sieve (this step is important, stops the bitty egg white bits you can get otherwise)

Combine zest, juice, butter and sugar in a small heavy bottomed saucepan. Gently heat and stir until the sugar dissolves and butter melts.

Remove from heat and whisk in the egg. Place back over low heat, stirring constantly until the curd thickens.

 

Enjoy!