A Week of Muffins: Pistachio-Chai Muffins

Marching on with our week filled with diverse, delicious muffins, we'll discuss Pistachio-Chai muffins today! These muffins are the only ones out of this whole week's worth that contain nuts. We love pistachios, and I don't think I've ever made a muffin with pistachios in them until now. I have to say, they really work great. They're slightly salty, even though I bought the raw, pre-shelled kind, and it was a nice contrast to the sweet muffin.

Unlike Martha Stewart's Chai Cupcakes, which I made not too long ago, these enlist the use of the contents of a couple of chai tea bags. With Martha's cupcakes, you infused the milk that went into the cake batter with black tea, then added into the dry ingredients the usual spices you would find in a chai tea. So, the end results are actually pretty different. With these muffins, you can see little flecks of the tea leaves running through the batter, and in the finished product. Plus, these are even more dense than the cupcakes were, and those cupcakes were on the denser side.

That's not to say these muffins are bad, though; on the contrary, they're great if you're looking for something that tastes vastly different from your run-of-the-mill muffin. The tea makes it taste exotic; the nuts give it a nice texture. One note: there's a simple powdered sugar glaze in the recipe for these; you'll notice in my pictures that I left that off my muffins. I was trying to cut down on the sugar, but feel free to try the glaze for yourself.

Pistachio-Chai Muffins
adapted from Cooking Light
makes 12 muffins

Ingredients
7.9 oz. (about 1 3/4 cups) all-purpose flour
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. kosher salt
2 chai blend tea bags, opened
1 cup low-fat buttermilk
2 Tbsp. unsalted butter, melted
2 Tbsp. Smart Balance Light Buttery Spread, melted
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract, divided
1 large egg, lightly beaten
Nonstick cooking spray
1/3 cup shelled, dry-roasted pistachios, chopped
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 Tbsp. water

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Weigh or lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine flour and next 4 ingredients (through salt) in a large bowl, stirring with a whisk. Cut open tea bags; add tea to flour mixture, stirring well.

2. Make a well in the center of the mixture. Combine buttermilk, butter, Smart Balance, vanilla, and egg in a separate bowl, stirring with a whisk. Add buttermilk mixture to flour mixture, stirring just until moist.

3. Place 12 muffin-cup liners in a muffin tin and spray each with nonstick cooking spray (I simply sprayed my muffin tin with spray, which worked fine). Divide batter evenly among muffin cups. Sprinkle nuts evenly over batter. Bake for 15 minutes, or until a wooden toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool for 5 minutes in the pan before turning the muffins out onto a cooling rack.

4. Combine the remaining 1/2 tsp. vanilla, powdered sugar, and 1 Tbsp. water, stirring until smooth. Drizzle evenly over the muffins.

CEIMB: Lemon-Ginger Iced Tea with Berry Cubes

This week's Craving Ellie in My Belly recipe was supposed to be the Peach Pie Smoothies. However, once again, I found myself not really wanting to make this one since it contains my nemesis, yogurt. I feel bad that I haven't been participating with the correct recipes for two weeks now, especially because next week and the week after I will be on vacation, and therefore unable to participate!

So, I decided to go ahead and make next week's recipe a bit early and post about it today. Next week's recipe is the Lemon-Ginger Iced Tea with Berry Cubes, chosen by Mary of Popsicles and Sandy Feet. This one was such a great, refreshing beverage to make for springtime! And we enjoy both iced tea and lemonade around these parts, so I figured this one would go over pretty well.

As usual with Ellie's recipes, this one is easy to make. You allow a saucepan of water, honey, and chopped ginger to boil, and them simmer briefly. Once that is finished, you add in 6 tea bags and steep it for a while. Strain out the solids, and then add a bunch more water, along with 1/2 cup fresh lemon juice. Then you chill it out in the fridge for a few hours. To accompany the iced tea, Ellie instructs you to plop some fresh raspberries in an ice cube tray, fill the tray with water, and freeze it until you have these adorable little berry cubes. Since my kids and my husband just did some strawberry picking over the weekend, I decided to slice those and use them in my cubes.

The tea turned out delicious! Not too sweet, just the right amount of lemon, and the berry cubes were definitely the highlight. I didn't have time to run out and get fresh mint and extra lemon for garnish, but I feel like the cubes do the job of a garnish nicely, so we didn't really miss the other stuff too much. Thanks to Mary for the pick, and my apologies to Chaya of Comfy Cook's Kosher Kitchen for skipping out on the Peach Pie Smoothie! Do head over to her blog to see how it turned out.

MSC: Chai Tea Cupcakes

This month, for the Martha Stewart Cupcakes Club, our assignment was to make the Chai Tea Mini Cupcakes with Condensed Milk Glaze. This month's cupcake is being hosted by Rachel of Simple Girl, since the blogger who originally chose for us to make these had to take some time off from her blog. I decided to make half mini cupcakes, and half regular-sized cupcakes this time. I just wanted to have both options available, and my first plan had been to do two different frostings (although that ended up changing).



So my husband loves to drink chai lattes from Starbucks, but he adds a twist to his. He orders them with two shots of espresso added in, and the slang for this is a "dirty chai." So in the spirit of experimentation, I thought it would be fun to make a frosting that sort of paid homage to his "dirty chai" habit. Plus, it was a great excuse to use up some heavy whipping cream I had hanging out in my fridge! So, I threw together some Espresso Whipped Cream to top my cupcakes.

I gotta say, this stuff was outstanding! I found it over on Epicurious; it's super easy and takes only minutes to make. You whip your cream to soft peaks, add in a touch of powdered sugar and 1 teaspoon of instant espresso powder, and continue whipping until stiff peaks form. There you go! I was so impressed with the whipped cream frosting that I wound up abandoning the condensed milk frosting that accompanies these cupcakes in Martha's book. I know it was probably delicious, but I don't think we really missed it. I topped the frosted cupcakes with just a dash of ground cinnamon, which I thought made the cupcakes look more latte-ish.

These ended up being loved by everybody who tried them; the pairing of cupcake and frosting worked very well! I loved the method of steeping the tea bags in milk and then using that milk as the liquid in the cake recipe. This would really be a fun thing to experiment a little bit more with. I dug the spices in the cake, as well. It truly was reminiscent of chai, but a little bit like a pumpkin-spiced cake, too. Not that I'm complaining!

Be sure to see what the other MSCers did with this month's cupcake recipe, by checking out the blogroll, here. Oh, and there's a bonus cupcake recipe this month, Martha's Easter Egg Cupcakes, but I made and blogged about those last year! So if you'd like to see how they turned out, you can see them here.