Butternut Pizza Crust

Today my princess and I were like "Master Chef" playing in the kitchen. ..We wanted to have a healthier choice of lunch.. Searching through Google and reading up others blogs. With the butternut pumpkin that I bought yesterday. We decided to make butternut crust pizza. There are some recipes which uses butternut and ground almond, that is totally gluten free pizza. However, we do not have ground almond at home, so we chosen the recipes with wheat flour.

First attempt using butternut for pizza crust. Surprisingly, it taste very good, especially the crust. We loved it! The crust turned out very beautiful - golden brown. The aroma is fantastic. Yes! we love it. We are going to do this more often.

After reading through few recipes, this is our ways of doing. I usually do not follow through the recipes. Only see how others do it and then I will do it my way. haha!!!

In case some do not know how butternut looks like, this is the picture

Ingredients

2¼ tsp Instant Yeast
½ Tbsp sugar
1 cup warm water
3½ - 4 cups bread flour ( I replaced with 1 cup wholemeal flour and 1 cup fine corn polent)
2 Tbsp olive oil
1½ tsp salt
1 cup butternut squash, cooked, and mashed

Method
Pour all the above ingredients into a big bowl to form dough. Usually 3 to 3.5 cups of flour in total is sufficient. The exact amount will vary with the water content in the butternut. Add flour slowly until a moist but not sticky dough forms. Cover the bowl with cling wrap and place in a warm location. The dough will rise to double the initial volume.
Turn the dough out on a floured surface and knead the dough and roll out on a lightly greased pizza pan.
Spread your favorite toppings on the pizza. Bake at 200 degree C for 15-18 minutes. Thicken crusts may require you to turn the oven down after baking 12minutes to 180 degrees C to complete the baking without burning the crust.

Topping:
Top with pizza sauce, cheese, minced beef, tomatoes, sliced mushrooms and olives.

or any of your choice of toppings. This is what we did.

My princess help to spread the pizza sauce , follow by cheese, minced beef, cut cherry tomatoes, sliced swiss brown and black olives.

Enjoy! God bless.

Orange Muffins

The very first time that I tried baking orange muffin was early this year.  In every Chinese New Year we bought lots of mandarin oranges. This is year we bought extra and we were having problem consuming them. So, to consume them, I tried to make mandarin oranges jam and also blending it to drink and also blending it to bake muffin. This is one of the muffin that turn out very moist and soft and nice and very fragrance. It was a "try and error", however, it turned out good! I went into several blogs and read up their posts. I am glad that I tried and I must said it is worth the time baking it. My daughter loves it so much because of the orange aroma.  Personally, I love it too. Since then, I have been baking orange muffins. My family have broke the record! We used to like only chocolate muffin which  you can also find my post on  double-chocolate-chips-muffins .But now we also like orange muffin. After CNY, I am using Sunkist oranges instead of mandarin orange to bake my muffins. I bought those 3 for $3.45 from Fairprice , big and juicy. As we are going to use the skin of the orange, so I will rub the orange skin with salt to remove the pesticides on the surface as much as I could and then rinse it with water. Using a grater to grate the outer orange skin of the entire of orange. After that  blend the whole orange with skin removed.  This is what I do, let get started!

Ingredients
2 1/2 cup self-raising flour
1/2 cup caster sugar(*see note)
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs lightly beaten
125g melted butter
1/3 cup milk
1 cup fresh orange blend
Zest of an orange

*Note : My family prefer things that are less sweet. So this is a less sugar recipe. If you refer sweet and very sweet, you may want to increase sugar to 3/4cup or 1cup.

Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 190°C. Place 12 paper cups in a muffin tray.

2. To get the zest of an orange. Wash the skin of the orange clean by gently rub the skin of orange with salt and then rinse.
With a grater, maintain enough pressure to remove the top layer of the rind. Take off only the rind of the orange's skin, and not the white pith, which tastes bitter. Set it aside.

3. Remove orange skin and seed. Put whole orange into blender or food proccessor and blend it into orange puree and set aside. (Orange puree is juice with the fibre.)

4. Place butter in a small pot  over low fire and melt it. Be careful not to burn it.

5. Place flour in a large  bowl.

6. Place lightly beaten egg, melted butter, milk, orange puree, orange zest, sugar and  salt into a separate bowl and mix.

7. Then pour the wet ingredients into the flour. Quickly combine the mixture. Do not over mixed.

8.. Spoon the mixture into paper cups to 3/4 full. Then place into the preheated oven and bake for 20-25 minutes or until the muffin turn golden brown or when skewer tested.

You may like to try these other muffins recipe
1. Blueberry Yoghurt Muffins
2. Blueberry and Bananas Muffins
3. Orange Butter Cake