Cranberry white chocolate muffins is one of my new favorite recipes celebrating a very special local ingredient here on the south Oregon coast: cranberries! One of the little known facts about Bandon, Oregon is that it’s home to 1600 acres of cranberry bogs, which make up 5% of the national cranberry crop, producing around 30 million pounds of berries. I have to confess that touring a cranberry bog has been pretty high on my bucket list since I moved to Oregon eight years ago. I wasn’t sure how to actually make that happen, but got very lucky recently and got to visit a cranberry bog during harvest as part of my day job. Part of the visit included getting a bag of cranberries - which I’m hoarding storing in the freezer.
I love cranberries so much that one small bag is not going to last me for the holiday season. Fortunately, local Bandon cranberries are a perfectly normal veggie in our local market. After stocking up this weekend, I’m feeling like I might just have enough cranberries for Thanksgiving. In the meantime, I just had to make cranberry white chocolate muffins. These have been so perfect first thing in the morning with a cup of coffee. They freeze like a dream, which means I’ve been able to spread out the bounty over a couple of weeks, while I contemplate other cranberry recipes to make.
I did think that I might want to retire and become a cranberry farmer. That particular fantasy got dashed on the rocks of despair when I learned that flooding the cranberry bog results in displaced spiders that decide the human being raking up the cranberries in the bog is a good dry island to climb on. Yeah, ok, cranberry farming is definitely not in my future. I still believe that cranberries floating in a bog is one of the prettiest sites on Earth.
Ingredients
- 1 cup flour
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 cup oil
- 1/2 cup Greek yogurt
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 cup whole cranberries (fresh or frozen)
- 1/2 cup white chocolate chips
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
- Combine dry ingredients, from flour through nutmeg, in a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, combine the eggs, oil, yogurt and vanilla. Fold the wet ingredients into the dry and mix. Fold in the cranberries and white chocolate chips.
- Line 12 muffin cups with muffin liners. Fill each muffin cup about half way.
- Bake for 20 minutes or until a skewer or knife inserted in the middle of a muffin comes out clean.
- Makes 12. Enjoy!
