Salmiakki Cupcakes ‒ Salmiakkimuffinsit

The past few days have been quite busy for me but at least I've been meeting a lot of great people: old schoolmates, fellow food bloggers and friends who celebrated Talvennapa with me. And as I explained here I prepared some snacks for the last occassion. The real success story of the night were vatruskas, another hand-sized pastry from Eastern Finland ‒ they were all gone before I understood to take a photo. I'll make them again another time but since I already got asked for the recipe of these muffins I'll better write it down while I still remember.

I took model primarily from Irina Somersalo's cookbook Yllin kyllin (Multikustannus 2008) and secondarily from Chocochili but if this recipe doesn't work don't blame them. I decorated them with a whole different frosting from a chocolate cake my mum likes to make, consisting of margarine, coffee and icing sugar. If you want it fluffier just leave the coffee out and whip it a bit. In that case you might also want to move the lemon peel from the muffins to the frosting. Lemon isn't necessary of course but I think it forms a nice opposite for salmiakki.

- 3 dl wheat flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 0.5 teaspoons baking soda
- 1 teaspoon apple wine vinegar
- 1 dl sugar (think next time I'll only use half the amount)
- 2 dl oat milk
- 0.5 dl sunflower oil
- 1 lemon peel
- 50-150 g of your favourite salmiakki sweets, crushed or chopped (I used 100 g of Turkinpippuri)

Mix the dry ingredients together. Grind the lemon peel. Add the rest into the paste as well. Stir carefully, just enough to get everything even. Spoon the paste into paper cups or muffin tins, leaving some extra space for them to rise in the oven. Bake about 15 minutes in 200°C. If you're going to decorate them with a frosting let them cool down first.

I got 15 cupcakes from this amount. One of them got thrown down from Pispalanharju, the world's highest esker ‒ of course with the paper removed.

Nutritional values / 1 muffin:
energy 123 kcal
fat 3 g
protein 2 g
carbohydrates 21 g
fiber 1 g