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Frozen berries may cool down the batter; you may experience a longer baking time. Make sure to clean and dry your tester between testings.

Orange and cranberry is such a great combination.

Beautiful with a latte.

These muffins are dense and quite moist. So moist, in fact, that they’re fairly forgiving about their baking time, so definitely don’t underbake them.

The sweet and neutral muffin crumb makes a fantasic wrapper for the orange and cranberry’s tart acidity. There’s plenty enough orange to stand up to the cranberry flavor, so you really get both.

The topping sticks better to the muffins once they’re fully cooled.

You find fresh cranberries in the store only for a relatively small sliver of the year, so these seem like winter muffins to me. Plus, if you’re as old as I am, you might continue to think of oranges a winter fruit, even though you’ve been able to buy them 24/7/360 for decades.

When you can’t walk through the produce section without doging display cases of fresh cranberries, I always buy an extra bag or two to throw in the freezer, specifically so that I can make these muffins throughout the year. You could certainly substitute another berry, though.

A little nutmeg in the topping might be a nice idea.

Don’t take your food safety advise from me, but I store these muffins at room temperature in a tightly sealed container for short term. They’re best same-day, but the difference on day two is so small that I’m not sure I care much about it. I’ve never had to store them long term, but if i did, I suppose I’d freeze or refrigerate them.

I generally don’t see cranberries in the store until sometime around Halloween (aka Middle-Christmas^[2]). Then, sometime in late February, guys in beat-up denim coveralls come into the store and look at all those old bags of cranberries that no one bought, and they sigh, shrug their shoulders, shift from foot to foot, until finally one of the guys goes, “We’re gonna have to juice’m.” And then, I swear, by April the entire juice aisle seems to be nothing but one cran after another. Aside from regular old cranberry juice cocktail^[3] and it’s supremacist cousin “white cranberry,” there’s cran-grape, cran-pomegranate, cran-raspberry, cranapple, cran-cherry, cran-strawberry, cranberry-blueberry-blackberry, and cranberry-lemonade. All this inter-fruit juicing is a threat to traditional juice! I believe that juice is just one orange, and another orange … who join together for the sole purpose of juicing each other. If you let fruits just start to co-mingle as they please, what’s next? What won’t they cram cran into?

One muffin is one serving. Although I cannot find this statute in any official rulebook, it seems obviously to be true. However, I always cut these muffins in half, and consider each half to be a serving. One could make smaller-sized muffins, I know. But the larger ones seem so glorious!

These will keep beautifully for a few days if you wrap them tightly once they’re cool. In terms of texture, the topping will lose some of its crunch, while the muffin itself remains just as lovely. In terms of flavor, the muffin overall will actually get better.

They also freeze well. Wrap each one tightly in plastic, then in foil, and then place them all into a ziplock. Then place the ziplock in a Tupperware container. Then wrap the Tupperware tightly with kitchen twine.

Serving Suggestion: for a delicious breakfast or late-night snack, crumble a half of a muffin into four or five large chunks and place in a cereal bowl. Cover with a single-serving container of Greek-sytle vanilla yogurt.