Sugar Free Orange and Fig Muffins

If your household is anything like ours, you’ve been gorging on mandarins during their peak season. I swear my children are going to turn into mandarins soon, my husband is not far behind them. Lucky Grandi bought him a mandarin tree last year for his birthday, we are hoping that perhaps next year it might fruit. But, my dirty little secret…I am not a mandarin lover – give me an orange over a mandy any day of the week. Sure they’re annoying to peel and juice everywhere (exactly my point) and not nearly as convenient for little chubby children’s hands in cars and supermarket trolleys, but oranges are where my citrus heart lies. Perhaps it’s all those netball half times. So as I’m finding it trickier to find good mandarins for my mandy-monsters, my beloved oranges are instead finding their way into the trolley. ‘Tis the season to load up on navel oranges! But with 3/4 of my family being orange adverse, my recent orange bounty has been turned into orange cakes like this one and now these orange and fig muffins…

Sugar Free Orange and Fig Muffins

Ingredients

2 oranges, peeled and chopped
Juice of 1 orange
125g butter
2 cups self-raising flour
2 tablespoons honey
1 egg
1 tsp bicarb soda
6-8 dried figs, chopped
Icing sugar and zest of oranges

Method

Preheat oven to 180 degrees and grease 12 x muffin tins. In a small saucepan stir together the chopped oranges, butter and orange juice until the butter is melted and well combined. Transfer to a large mixing bowl, sift in the flour and bicarb soda, then add the egg, honey and chopped figs. Stir until combined, the mixture should be light and foamy from the heated oranges and juice. Spoon into muffin tins and bake for 20 minutes. Top with more of the dried figs, orange zest and dust with icing sugar.

These are delicious with a cup of chai in the afternoon, and have really been hitting my 3pm ravenously hungry spot nicely! Eleanor can take or leave cakes sometimes…but then sometimes is a total cake monster. Toddlers. These have been a hit though, and bonus: sugar free. Although the deliciously sticky figs, sweet orange juice and honey are enough to hit the sweetest tooth! We just need to plant another fig tree here and I’ll be sorted (our last one copped an almighty frost) but I miss having armloads and armloads of figs from our orchard in South Australia, dried and available to me all year round.

Do you have mandarin monsters living in your house too?
Are orange quarters at netball still on offer?
Got a giant fig tree that supplies you year round?