Delicious prickly pear fruit muffins made with prickly pear juice, melted butter, sugar, lime zest and lime juice and perfumed with cinnamon.
Are you into experimenting new flavors for breakfast muffins, then this is a must try .
This is simple, you only need fresh prickly pear juice not the bottle syrup.
Health Benefits of Prickly Pear?
Other names of Prickly pear fruits are opuntia, nopal fruit, tuna, sabra, Barbary pear, and Indian fig.
The fruit of the Opuntia cactus contains health-boosting nutrients like amino acids, fatty acids, and antioxidants like betalains, polyphenols, and flavonoids.
In traditional medicine, Opuntia engelmannii /Prickly pear fruit used for the treatment of burns, wounds, edema, hyperlipidemia, obesity, and catarrhal gastritis.
Alcoholic extracts known for anti-inflammatory, hypoglycemic, and antiviral purposes
What is the Red Prickly Pear fruit?
Prickly pear fruit comes in different colors, white, green, purple, yellow, red, or even orange.
Red prickly pear fruits are an excellent source of vitamin c, magnesium, and dietary fiber, along with calcium, potassium, zinc, and iron.
Red prickly pear fruits are covered in rough bumps and spines known as glochids.
These sharp spines are tiny, hair-like and difficult to see and found in the areoles or brown spots on the skin.
Inside the fruit, the vibrant magenta flesh is moist with many hard edible brown-black seeds.
These seeds are tough to chew, need to swallowed whole or discarded completely. Ripe, prickly pear fruit is a juicy and aromatic with sweet flavor and has a hint of watermelon or a strawberry .
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How to make Prickly Pear Muffins ?
You need following 8 ingredients to make this muffin.
- Flour : Use unbleached all-purpose flour. If you want, you can use a combo or whole wheat flour and all-purpose flour.
- Sugar: I used two kind of sugar, granulated sugar for the muffin batter and sparkling sugar
- Leavener: baking soda and baking powder
- Lime zest : I used zest of 1 lemon
- Lime juice : 1 small lime juice or ½ lime juice. Lime juice brings out flavor of prickly pear juice.
- Prickly pear juice : You need ½ cup prickly pear juice. ( About 3 fruit juice)
- Melted butter : I used unsalted melted butter. If you are using salted, you need to eliminate salt in the recipe.
- Cinnamon : Only few spices go well with prickly pear and cinnamon is one of them.
- Egg: Use one large egg as it acts as binder. Salt: I used sea-salt you can use favorite salt.
See recipe card for quantities.
Tips to make perfect prickly pear muffins?
Use freshly squeezed juice. For extracting the prickly pear fruit juice check the post in this website for more information.
I have used lime juice and lime zest as it goes well with prickly pear. If you want, you can use lemon juice and lemon zest.
Adding sparkling sugar and lime zest on the top of muffin gives subtle sweetness and crunch
In a bowl add dry ingredients, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and half of lime zest
Wet ingredients egg, melted butter, prickly pear juice, lime juice mix well
Muffin batter
Ready for baking
Variations to these muffins?
Addition of lime or lemon juice and its zest enhance the flavor of the prickly pear fruit in the recipe.
If you want to make it vegan, skip egg and melted butter and add oil and any diary free milk.
Spices like cinnamon, all-spice berries go well with muffin.
If you want you can either glaze the muffin with prickly pear juice or you can light frost the muffins. Make sure to add prickly pear juice to it to give nice dark pink color .
Inspite of this prickly pear muffins gives nice dark pink color to batter, baked muffins have only a very light color.
If you like this prickly pear muffins you will love these too.
I made this muffin as part of this month #MuffinMonday.
Prickly Pear Muffins Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 ½ cup /195g all-purpose flour
- ¾ cup /150g sugar
- 1 teaspoons baking powder
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- ½ teaspoon cinnamon
- ¼ teaspoon / 1g salt
- ½ cup Prickly Pear Juice about 3-4 fruit
- 5 tablespoon Unsalted butter melted
- 1 large egg
- 1 lime Juice
- 1 lime zest
- ½ teaspoon cinnamon
- 1 tablespoon sparkling sugar
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 425°F (218°C). line with muffin tin with muffin liners. Set aside.
- First wash cut both end of prickly pears, then make a slit in the middle and cut through it.
- Scoop the flesh of prickly pear using spoon or knife. smash with the back of spoon through the strainer and collect Juice.
- In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda ,cinnamon, half of lime zest and salt.
- In another bowl, beat together melted butter, and egg.
- To this add lime juice and prickly pear juice and mix well
- Incorporate the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix. Don’t overmix.
- Divide the batter about 3 tablespoons evenly between the prepared muffin cups.
- In a small bowl, combine the 1 tablespoon sparkling sugar and rest of lime zest and mix well. Sprinkle the lime zest sugar mixture over the tops of the batter filled cups.
- Bake the muffins 375°F (190.5°C) for 15-18 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
Video
Notes
Nutrition
This is Swathi ( Dr. Ambujom Saraswathy Ph.D) from Zesty South Indian Kitchen who loves to explore cuisines from all over the world. Whenever possible I try to to give an Indian touch to several of the world cuisine, and has weakness for freshly baked bread. All the recipes you see here are created by me and approved after taste-test by my family.
Ryan M. says
I harvested the prickly pear seeds and pulp. With the pulp, I dried it out and blended it until it was a fine powder. With the seeds, I toasted them to bring out the flavor and milled them into flour.
I followed the recipe with these two modifications: I mixed 3/4 cup of prickly pear flour with 3/4 cup all-purpose flour instead of 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour. I also added 2 TBSP of the prickly pear powder. The muffins were packed with the prickly pear flavor and the colors were rich!
Just for fun, I added a thin layer of prickly pear jelly on one of them. The muffins didn’t even need them, they were so good!
Nicole says
So fun to try a totally new kind of muffin that I’ve never even thought of! The kids were mind blown that these were apart cactus!!
Claudia Cristina Ciorteanu says
Tried these prickly pear muffins, and they’re fantastic! The unique twist of the prickly pear makes them a must-try. Highly recommend!
Claudia says
This worked exactly as written, thanks!
Sonja says
Such lovely and fruity muffins! Never had any with prickly pear before and these were certainly yummy!
Adriana says
This worked exactly as written, thanks!
Anonymous says
Can you make this recipe without the lime zest?
Swathi says
yes you can
Samantha says
Prickly pears grow abundantly around me, and are ripe for the picking! I am definitely inspired and going to try this recipe soon, is there any way to cut down the sugar a bit to make these a little healthier?
Swathi says
Prickly pear if sweet you can reduce it, or you can use brown sugar instead of white.
Jean says
so flavorful muffins and the addition of cinnamon too. didnt know lots about pears will have to check our local grocery.
Marysa says
What a fun idea for muffins! I haven't tried a recipe with prickly pear in it before and this would be fun to try out.
Sol says
These pear muffins are so unique for me! I bet they smell good too!
Sol says
These pear muffins are so unique for me! They're too delicious to look at! I bet they smell good too!
Ivan M. Jose says
I love how those muffins are looking. I'm sure they smell really good.
Radha says
These sound amazing! Need to look for the prickly pear juice. The flavor is interesting and would love to try.
MELANIE EDJOURIAN says
That's handy as prickly pears seem to be in season, I seem to find them everywhere. I'd love to try my hand at the muffins!!!
Gervin Khan says
This looks awesome! I love muffins and it's one of my favorite snacks. I would love to try what you're saying in xmas!
Louisa says
I have never tasted prickly pear and didn't know it could be this interesting
Richelle Escat says
I really love the color of this fruit. Sadly it's not available in my area.
Alita Pacio says
Prickly pears are new to me but it`s always goo to try new recipes!
Tara Pittman says
Prickly pears grow wild in my state. I have some in the freezer, so I have to make these muffins
Anna Elle Liz says
Not me thinking prickly pear was only a thing that existed from the Jungle Book song 🤦🏽♀️. I love muffins and cupcakes so this seems like such an interesting recipe to try!
Sandhya Ramakrishnan says
I would have never thought of using prickly pear in a muffin recipe. What a great idea and being muffin lovers, I will be making it right away.
Gail Montero says
I've been looking for ways to use up pear this fall and this is perfect for that!
Mitch says
Pears are one of my favorite fruits, I am so glad for this extra info on the prickly varieties!
Natalie says
These muffins are so exotic. I think I never tried prickly pear. But they definitely sound delicious. Perfect fall treat.
Amber Myers says
I am intrigued by the flavor. I bet I would love it. I always enjoying muffins in the morning.
Dana says
Fantastic muffins and I love the addition of cinnmon.
Claudia Lamascolo says
These look so nice and light, we are huge muffin pans and I will be trying this recipe soon. The juice sounds like a great pairing with cinnamon
Wendy Klik says
These sound amazing Swathi. YUM.
Jolene says
Now I've got to go hunt down some prickly pears! These look awesome!
Karen @Karen's Kitchen Stories says
Prickly pears are totally new to me and you've made me want to hunt some down!
Stacy says
I love when I find exotic fruit in muffin recipes! Yours make me want to rush out and buy some prickly pears right away, Swathi!