Cranberry Cardamom Spice Muffins - Sally's Baking Addiction (2024)

Published: 11/16/2016Updated: 04/18/2021

Homemade cranberry cardamom spice muffins combine favorite holiday flavors into one muffin. Each bite is bursting with fresh cranberries, orange, walnuts, cinnamon, and cardamom. The perfect fall breakfast, snack, or dessert!

Your search for the perfect cold weather weekend breakfast (or snack!) ends here. A perfectly tart and sweet combination of cranberry and orange is one of my favorite flavors this time of year, and I’ve used it as inspiration for many recipes like cranberry sauce and cranberry orange Bundt cake. Today we’re adding to the list with cranberry cardamom spice muffins—oodles of tart cranberries in a sweet orange scented batter with walnuts and plenty of delicious holiday cardamom spice flavor. I call this one “November in a muffin.” 😉

These Cranberry Cardamom Spice Muffins Are:

• Tart and sweet, similar to cranberry Christmas cake
• Perfectly spiced with warm fall flavors
• Extra soft, buttery, and moist
• Loaded with tart cranberries, fresh orange, and crunchy walnuts
• A texture lover’s dream!
• Drizzled with a sweet orange icing
• Super quick—ready in just 35 minutes

Behind The Recipe

I turned to my trusty master muffin recipe as the base of these Thanksgiving inspired muffins. What’s a master muffin recipe? It’s 1 muffin batter that can produce all sorts of different muffin varieties and flavors. Here are some of my other muffin recipes that begin with the same base muffin recipe: apple cinnamon muffins, peach muffins, cranberry orange muffins, strawberry cheesecake muffins, and blueberry muffins.

This recipe creates soft and buttery muffins, thanks to butter and sour cream. Creaming butter and sugar together creates a fluffy base, so these definitely aren’t your typical super dense muffins. Rather, they’re impeccably soft, just like vanilla cupcakes. Lots of little ingredients paired together create big-time flavor in this recipe. I adore cardamom for its versatility and often use it in chai spice inspired treats like these chai spice snickerdoodles. It’s easy to go overboard with a strong spice such as cardamom, but I find that 1 teaspoon was the perfect amount distributed among 1 dozen muffins.

• By the way: If you’re not into any of today’s add-ins, simply swap them out. That’s what makes this base muffin recipe such a staple in my kitchen—the flavor possibilities are truly endless. Try blueberries instead of cranberries, add chocolate chips or white chocolate chips, leave out the spices, try pecans instead of walnuts, etc.

How To Make Cranberry Cardamom Spice Muffins

These come together in a snap—much needed when your holiday to-do list is a mile long.

1. Whisk the dry ingredients together: flour, leaveners, spices, and salt.
2. Mix the wet ingredients together: butter, sugar, eggs, sour cream, and vanilla extract.
3. Combine the wet and dry ingredients & add milk and orange zest. Fold in the walnuts andcranberries.
4. Spoon batter into muffin pan.
5. Bake. These muffins take about 22-23 minutes.
6. Make icing & drizzle onto muffins.

Quick Tip for Filling Your Muffin Pan

Fill the muffin pan all the way to the top with batter. Don’t be nervous about overflowing because we’ll start the muffins in an extremely hot oven. A hot burst of air will lift the muffins right up—and not out. Reducing the oven temperature after 5 minutes ensures the centers cook through while preventing the tops from burning. It’s a little trick I’ve been using for years and the super tall muffin topsnever cease to amaze me!

Orange Icing

The icing is made from just 2 ingredients: confectioners’ sugar and orange juice. You’ll need the zest of an orange for the muffin batter, so cut that fruit open and juice it for the orange icing. The icing sets on top of the muffins after several minutes, creating an absolutely scrumptious icing “crust” on top. (!!!)

A couple other icings that would work: vanilla icing or the maple icing from my maple brown sugar cookies. So good.

More Favorite Muffin Recipes

• Banana Muffins
• Morning Glory Muffins
• Blueberry Muffins
• Pumpkin Crumb Cake Muffins
• Whole Wheat Apple Cinnamon Muffins
• Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins
• Gingerbread Muffins
• Simply Pumpkin Muffins

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