Clementine Poppy Seed Muffins

don't mind my terrible picture taking abilities lol

So when my in-laws were here last weekend, they bought us a large Costco-sized bag of clementines.  While I love clementines, there are quite a lot and they weren't all that sweet, but they were juicy and pretty good. I wanted to make some type of baked good, and I came across a clementine poppy seed muffin recipe. Sounded delicious, but had terrible reviews, so I sort of combined it with a lemon poppy seed muffin recipe and omitted some spices I don't like and this is what I came up with. The muffins were moist and delicious and I will be making more today to freeze a bunch :). Anyways, here's the recipe I ended up with:

Clementine Poppyseed Muffins:

1/2 cup butter, softened
2/3 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 cup plain yogurt
3 clementines
2 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2 heaping Tbsp poppy seeds

Preheat oven to 350º.

First mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and poppy seeds in a bowl. Zest 2 of the clementines and add the zest into the flour mixture.  Now you get to decide how to use the rest of your clementine in the muffins.  I peeled and diced mine into small chunks and added them to the dry ingredients, but make sure you cut them somewhere you can reserve the juice that escapes while dicing (I used my cutting board that has a groove on the outer edge), you will want that juice for the wet ingredients. If you don't want chunks in your muffins you can skip the dicing and just juice them for the wet ingredients. I liked the chunks okay, but because some of the clementines were a little bitter, it made for some not so great bites of muffin here and there. When I make them today I'm going to skip the chunks and just add the juice. But the chunks would be nice if the clementines were sweet.

I just used my mixer with the whisk for this... Cream butter and sugar together for about 2 minutes until light and fluffy. Add in eggs and yogurt until combined. Either juice your clementines at this point and add the juice, or add the reserved juice from when you diced the clementines.

Add the dry ingredients to the mixer, and stir just until combined. Scoop the batter into greased muffin tins, filling them 3/4 of the way. Bake for 15-20 minutes until lightly browned.  Dump out on a wire rack immediately to cool. I made about 15 muffins with one batch.  I'll let you know how the ones I make today turn out ;).


Update: Okay so the muffins i made today with just the juice were AWESOME. it also added to the awesomeness that i made a little glaze with the juice of one clementine whisked with about 1/2 cup of powdered sugar and poured it on top of the muffins. mmmmm...