Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal Muffins

I realise it has almost literally been forever, but I have a few things to post about and the first one is some delicious, healthy muffins!



As usual, this recipe started with the dry ingredients: whole wheat flour, white sugar, brown sugar and some oats.


Next I washed two lovely Ida Red apples.


And skinned and chopped them up.


The wet ingredients: water, oil, eggs and vanilla.


I threw the wet ingredients in with the dry ingredients, and then added the apples and some cinnamon... because I forgot to add it with the dry ingredients.


All mixed up.


I filled a greased muffin tin, and put it in the oven.


They rose quite nicely and smelled amaaaazing while baking.

This is a recipe I sort of made up based on my chocolate chip muffin recipe, but it turned out so well. These are great for breakfast. It's like eating apple cinnamon oatmeal. The only thing I'd like is for them to have less sugar, so the next time I make them I will try them with less. The healthier, the better!

Recipe

Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal Muffins
1½ cups whole wheat flour
½ cup rolled oats
1/3 cup light-brown sugar, packed
1/3 cup sugar
cinnamon to taste
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup milk or water
1/2 cup oil
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1½-2 cups chopped apples

×××

Preheat oven to 400°F and grease a muffin pan.
In a large bowl, stir together flour, oats, sugars, cinnamon, baking powder, and salt. In another bowl, stir together milk/water, eggs, oil, and vanilla until blended. Make a well in centre of dry ingredients and add wet ingredients, stirring just to combine. Stir in apple.
Spoon batter into prepared muffin cups and bake for 15-20 minutes or until a muffins pass the toothpick test.
Allow muffins to cool on a wire rack for five minutes before removing from pan to continue cooling.
Serve warm or completely cooled. Muffins can be frozen.

Guten Appetit! Continue reading...

Chocolate Chip Muffins

After all the muffin-making I did in the summer, I've noticed a serious lack of muffins around here recently. So, a few weeks ago (actually, it was a month ago...), I made chocolate chip muffins! This was something I'd never done before - all my previous muffins had been fruity. So I was excited. There was chocolate involved, how I could not have been excited?!


The process started out, as usual, with my wet and dry ingredients.

Flour, sugars, baking powder and salt.


Milk, oil, eggs and vanilla.

And then I just mixed them both together.

Simple or what?

The only other step was to add chocolate chips.

Normally I just dump them in all wild and crazy, but this time I measured them out. I put in about a cup, and it was the perfect amount.

The recipe also calls for nuts, but I hate hate hate nuts in baking, so I left them out.

I spooned the batter into a greased muffin tin, and tossed them in the oven.


15-20 minutes later, these beauties came out:







Nomnomnomnom.

These muffins have officially earned the status of "staple." I mean, if I had time to bake muffins all the time, these would be the ones I'd bake. Which is not to say that the process is time consuming, in fact these are very quick, I just mean that I have no time. Which is why I'm updating my blog at 12.13AM on a Sunday.
Anyway, I made these muffins again last weekend when my parents and Anders' parents were here, and they were gone within minutes of me putting them on the table in front of our small crowd.
They're light, they're fluffy, they're tasty, they're chocolatey, they're absolutely everything you could ask for from a muffin.

Man... I want a muffin...

Recipe

Chocolate Chip Muffins

×××

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup light-brown sugar, packed
1/3 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup milk
1/2 cup oil
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
chocolate chips
1/2 cup walnuts or pecans, chopped (optional)

×××

Preheat oven to 400°F and grease a muffin tin.
In a large bowl, stir together flour, sugars, baking powder, and salt. In another bowl, stir together milk, eggs, oil, and vanilla until blended. Make a well in centre of dry ingredients and add milk mixture, stirring just to combine. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts (if using).
Spoon batter into prepared muffin tin and bake for 15-20 minutes or until a muffins passes the toothpick test.
Allow muffins to cool on a wire rack for five minutes before removing from pan to continue cooling.
Serve warm or completely cooled. Muffins can be frozen.
Makes 12 standard sized muffins.

Guten Appetit! Continue reading...

Banana Pineapple Muffins

Oh. My.
Everyone who reads this is probably so tired of reading about muffins. Lots and lots of muffins, I know! But muffins are good! Breakfast, dessert, a snack... they're multi-talented, let's face it. And these ones. Well, I could gobble down about 12. Whole. That's how good they are. Except if I ate them whole I guess I wouldn't really taste all the banana pineapple goodness. And I certainly wouldn't want that.

Anyway, my original inspiration for this recipe was, naturally, bananas going bad on our counter. Also, this recipe from The Crepes of Wrath. This recipe looked reeeeally good. Except I don't like coconut (not shredded coconut anyway, I like the flavour though!) or dried pineapple. Or raisins in my baking. Uhhh. But I still thought it looked great and interesting. Especially since I was trying to use up bananas and we had fresh pineapple in the fridge. Of course, my recipe is far far different, so it's posted below.

There were a lot of bowls in this recipe, which I'm not a big fan of. I like one-bowl recipes... they're so uncommon though.

ANYWAY.

Instead of using butter, I used (surprise!) olive oil. I was going to use honey, as well, until my naive illusions were crushed and I found out bright yellow sugar has fewer calories and carbohydrates than honey! Can you believe it? All I had to do was read the labels. Who would have thought to do that? Especially someone who is watching what they eat. Man, I'm dull. Anyway, I was actually pretty excited, because brown sugar has a lot of flavour, and honey... not so much. That said, I know that honey is still better for you because it's unrefined, unlike most sugars. My next goal is to find sugar that actually has some good flavour and won't kill you.

I started by mixing together some olive oil, bright yellow sugar, vanilla, and rum.

Oh yea... real rum.

Next, I crushed some bananas up with the eggs.


In the end, these are what the bowls looked like:

Oil doesn't mix very well with brown sugar, apparently.

But all was well when the two separate bowls of ingredients got together.


The dry ingredients consisted of flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon and nutmeg.


After I mixed in the dry ingredients, I chopped up about a cup of fresh pineapple and threw that in, too.


And scooped the batter into my greased muffin tin and put them in the oven.


20 minutes later, these smelled irrestibly delicious. I cooled them in the pan for a few minutes.


And then turned them out to cool completely on my wire racks.




While the muffins were cooling, I made surprise lasagna for myself and my parents...

after which we gobbled down some of these muffins:


Seriously. I can't believe how good these muffins are. They're so moist, and the pineapple adds a nice punch of flavour to what would be otherwise normal banana muffins. Not that I don't like banana muffins. I really do, but they're tried and true, easy, comfortable, simple, etc. The pineapple is such an amazing touch. Also, rum? Freakin' add it to anything you bake with bananas. It's so. good.

Recipe

Banana Pineapple Muffins

½ cup olive oil
½ cup packed brown sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons rum
3-4 ripe bananas, mashed
2 large eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour
¾ teaspoons baking soda
¾ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
½ cup pineapple

×××

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease a muffin tin. In a large bowl, beat together the oil, brown sugar, vanilla, and rum. Combine the mashed bananas and eggs in a separate bowl and add to the sugar mixture. Beat until thoroughly combined. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon and nutmeg. Stir it into the banana mixture. Chop up a cup of fresh pineapple and add to batter. Spoon the batter into the muffin cups. Bake the muffins for 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean. Remove from the oven, and let cool in the tins before removing to cool completely.

Guten Appetit! Continue reading...

Orange Berry Muffins

My computer crashed and I lost this once already, so I'm annoyed, but the show must go on and you must see this recipe for muffins.
Even if my previous write up was far cleverer than this one will be.

Anyway, today is Canada Day! Yayyy, Happy Canada Day! Woo 141 years as a country. You go, second largest land mass in the world!
The thing is, I didn't get a long weekend, thanks to McMaster (and in part, the government) deciding we should work on Monday and have real Canada Day off. At first I was pretty annoyed about this whole thing, but all was forgiven when I stepped into the kitchen early this afternoon. And then, a series of thoughts went through my head: 1) Ooh, I'll try my hand at Brötchen again, with one of the three recipes I've been hoarding; 2) Man, this calls for one whole pound of flour? That's a lot, especially if it's not going to work out yet again. I'll try this roulade recipe I found a few days ago. 3) Whhhat? This calls for a lot of whipping cream. And gelatin? No problem, I'll try Quark, instead! 4) Oh yea, all the stores are closed and we don't keep Quark on hand... I'll just make cookies. 5) Oh, we don't have chocolate chips... okay, which of the over 20 recipes in my "To Try" folder do I have the ingredients for?

Turned out I had the ingredients for these bad boys. I originally got the recipe from Eat Me, Delicious, but of course, it was altered as I went along.

To be perfectly honest, I was reluctant to put in the orange zest. I hate zest in baking. Sacrelige, right? Sorry, but I hate it. It interferes with lovely moist cake or smooth filling, or whatever. I just don't like it.

But I don't have a zester, so I used the very fine side of a cheese grater. It turned the zest into mush, which is perfect by my standards.

Next, I took that same orange and cut it into quarters to juice it.

I love this juicer. It's so efficient. You should go get one.

The orange gave me about 1/2 cup of juice. I filled the measuring cup up to 1 cup with milk, then added two eggs, some honey and oil. I meant to add some vanilla, too, but I forgot. I was disappointed.

This looked so delicious that I forgot about the muffins and just drank this.







I'm totally lying.

I actually just whisked it all together until it looked uniform.

Now, this wasn't the first place I deviated from the recipe, but it was the first time I had a bit of a headscratcher. The recipe told me to rub the zest and the sugar together with my fingers. But I didn't use sugar. I used honey. And I had already put the honey in with the liquid ingredients. So I decided to put in an extra tablespoon of honey.


And mixed it until uniform.


Then I mixed in the flour and baking soda (it called for baking powder, too, but I was surprised to find we didn't have any), and then the liquid ingredients.


The recipe called for blueberries, and we did have some, but they're so much more expensive than in-season strawberries, so I threw those in, instead.

I had to fold it pretty gently because I picked out the softest ones, so as not to "waste" the nicest ones that can be eaten by themselves. Mmm.

And then I spooned the batter into a greased muffin tin.

I love this thing. My mum bought it for me after she saw me struggling to get cookie dough out of a 1/8 cup measure. It's perfect, because you can push whatever it is you're scooping out with the soft little silicon bit. You should probably go out and get one of these, too. It's good for scooping ice cream, too.



Fresh out of the oven, I was expecting that these would smell amazingly orange. But they didn't.



They still looked amazing.


Really. Amazing.

And how did they taste?


Pretty darn good! Not nearly enough orange flavour, but it was there. Next time, I would probably use two oranges, instead of just one. The strawberries are great, though! These little bursts of flavour and freshness. Delish.

And since I changed the recipe, here's my version.

Recipe

Orange Berry Muffins
1 orange*
Milk
2 large eggs
5 tablespoons honey
¼ cup olive oil
2 ½ cups all-purpose flour
2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 ½-2 cups berries – fresh or frozen (not thawed)

×××

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Grease a muffin tin and place it on a baking sheet.
Pour the orange juice into a large glass measuring cup and top up to 1 cup with milk. Whisk in the eggs, oil and 4 tablespoons of the honey.
In a large bowl, mix the orange zest and the remaining tablespoon of honey. Whisk in the flour, baking powder and baking soda. Pour the liquid ingredients over the dry ingredients and, with the whisk or a rubber spatula, gently but quickly stir just to blend. Gently mix in the berries and divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups.
Bake for 15 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean. Transfer the pan to a rack and cool for 5 minutes before turning out the muffins.
Makes about 15 standard-sized muffins.

*I recommend using 2 oranges, not just one. Also, add some vanilla!

Guten Appetit! Continue reading...

Honey Banana Muffins

Have you ever left a bunch of fruit like bananas or pears sitting around your house until the bananas are black and you can't pick up the pears without putting your thumb through the skin? No? Because that's pretty much a weekly occurence in this house. It's a terrible habit I've taken with me into the beginning of my life away from home, much to Anders' shagrin, I'm sure. In any event, in true Gulewitsch-Broadley-Malott household fashion, we left three bananas and three pears in our kitchen for about a week. Mum was going to make banana bread with them, because that's what we usually do when we find almost-black bananas in our kitchen. This time, though, I decided to look up something different. We let bananas go bad so often and I can only eat so much damned banana bread.
What I found was honey banana muffins. It looked good to me because it has no added fat (like oil or butter), no sugar (only honey, which I somehow consider healthier) and applesauce. Of course, I didn't actually have applesauce, but I did have really soft pears and a food processor. And, naturally, I strayed from the original recipe quite a lot. I really see recipes as guidelines. Sort of like the pirates' code.

I started by pulling out the lovely Kitchenaid mini food processor that has never been used.

I nuded up my pears and quartered them, taking the cores out as I went:




Then, pulsed them until they were fairly smooth, but with some solid bits remaining:


Then, I roughly mashed up the three bananas and mixed that and the pears with two eggs and some honey:




The dry ingredients simply consisted of flour (supposed to be partly whole wheat, but I was sad to discover we were out), baking soda, nutmeg and cinnamon.

I omitted the salt because it's bad for your brain!

And then I let the wet and the dry meet and they had a grand ol' time getting to know each other:

It went very smoothly, if you know what I mean.

I decided to go with the suggestion in the recipe (shock, awe!) and grease the muffin tin rather than line it. With no oil in the batter, I bet these would have stuck like crazy and we would have had to eat the paper to get all the muffiny goodness.


After 18 minutes in a 375°F oven, they were lightly golden and passed the toothpick test. I let them cool in the pan for a few minutes (another suggestion in the recipe!) while I did some dishes, then popped them out and set them on a wire rack to cool completely.

I love how baked banana things get these big bumps on them. They're like banana camels.


At this point, I wished you could photograph scents because daaaamn, these smelled fine.

And then I waited impatiently for this morning when I could eat one for breakfast as I ran out the door to work.

Literally, I took a bite, took a photo, threw it in a Ziploc bag and ran out the door. And then I finished it at my desk.


Okay, so here's my new way of doing this:

Pros:
+ really simple recipe;
+ no refined sugar;
+ no added fat;
+ no salt;
+ extremely moist;
+ not too dense or heavy, like other banana baking can be;
+ a good way to use up fruit you wouldn't otherwise eat.

Cons:
- a little short on flavour.

I think next time, I'll use another banana and more apple/pear sauce, plus some more cinnamon and a bit more honey. The idea, I guess, is to keep the muffins healthy but punch up the flavour. These still made a really great breakfast, even if you do eat it running out the door.

Recipe

This is the recipe I used for these muffins, not the recipe I plan to use in the future.

Honey Banana Muffins
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 eggs, lightly beaten
3 ripe bananas, mashed
1/3 cup unsweetened pear sauce
3 tablespoons honey

×××

Preheat oven to 375°F and lightly grease a muffin tin. In a large bowl, combine the dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, combine the eggs, banana, applesauce and honey and mix into the dry ingredients, just until moistened. Fill muffin cups to two-thirds full with batter. Bake for 15-18 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool for 5 minutes before removing from the pan to wire racks.


Seriously, can you believe how simple that is?!

Guten Appetit! Continue reading...