Bran Muffins with Molasses and Apricots

You'll notice if you look at the linked recipe for these muffins that they are called Molasses Bran Muffins.  Well, the name sounded very familiar to me, so I looked back and saw that I had already made Molasses Bran Muffins from Good to the Grain.  These are different, so I decided they needed a different name as well.

These bran muffins are soft and nice and flavorful.  I like biting into the sweet dried apricots.  Next time I might try to break up the flax seeds to get more of the nutrition out of them.  I think it may also be interesting if I make these, or an adaptation of these, with the pomegranate molasses I got at the market around the corner.

Whole Wheat Oatmeal-Cranberry Muffins

I bought buttermilk recently to make the Granola Muffins and the Buckwheat Amaranth Muffins.  Those two combined used a total of two cups, so I had two cups left to finish in order to avoid wasting any of the buttermilk.  I searched the blogs I read for recipes and found these Whole Wheat Oatmeal-Cranberry Muffins.  I like oats in anything so I decided to make them.

These are fantastic muffins.  They are extremely moist and tasty.  I substituted oil for the 2 tablespoons of applesauce because I didn't have any, but I'd like to try it that way next time to make them healthier.  I was hesitant about the dried cranberries, since they are kinda boring, but I went with them anyway and I think they work really well here.  I'd like to try some frozen cranberries, or orange zest instead of the cinnamon.  I think this could be a great base for a lot of other flavor combinations and different fresh, frozen or dried fruits.

Buckwheat and Amaranth Muffins

Not too long ago I posted about Steel Cut Oatmeal and Blueberry Muffins that I made after I saw the extremely exciting MUFFIN feature in the Recipes for Health section of the NY Times.  These Buckwheat and Amaranth Muffins are another recipe from that series that I had been just dying to try.  You can't see them in the picture, but these muffins have big blackberry-bombs in them.  In fact, 3 or 4 of the muffins had a big chunk fall out the bottom because the blackberry was a bit too close to the edge.  Next time I'll put a small scoop of batter in each cup before I even mix in the blackberries.  And yes, there will be a next time, because these were delicious.

Granola Muffins

I have been making granola almost every weekend.  It started when one of my friends from school was doing South Beach and said she had trouble thinking of things to eat for breakfast that were whole grain.  I suggested granola and she said she would buy some.  BUY some?!  Um, no.  You can make that yourself in like 5 seconds and it is a hundred times better.  She has no interest in doing that, though, so I said I would make her some.  And then I just kept making it every week.

Recently I had a little too much granola.  I saw these Granola Muffins in the NY Times Recipes for Health section and I really wanted to make them.  I used the Honey Granola I made from the Rose Bakery cookbook (I'll post about that soon).  I used dried cranberries here.  I think they taste great, and what a fantastic way to use up extra granola!  I put a bunch in the freezer, so we will get to enjoy them for a while.

Steel Cut Oatmeal and Blueberry Muffins

I have been really into the NY Times Recipes for Health lately.  Recently, the week's recipes were whole-grain muffins.  The main article was posted, along with the first recipe, the day before the rest - and I was so excited to see those recipes, I kept checking back until they appeared!  I happened to have some extra cooked steel-cut oats in the fridge, so I started with the Steel Cut Oatmeal and Blueberry Muffins.

I used frozen blueberries and didn't bother tossing them with flour as suggested.  I think next time I will try it, though, as the berries smeared the batter with purple streaks.  The muffins weren't very sweet.  I like them this way, and I think with fresh Jersey blueberries in the summer, they will be perfect.  Ken wanted more sugar in them, though.  I think they would be a nice side to an omelet or similar savory breakfast.  Next time I will also try to eliminate the 1 cup of all purpose flour that is included in the batter, although they did rise beautifully and form nice domed tops, but it's worth a shot.  This is a great recipe for when you cook steel-cut oats for the whole week but get sick of them by Friday - the leftovers can just be stirred into the muffin batter!

Millet Muffins

These Millet Muffins are from the sampler PDF for Heidi Swanson's new cookbook.  I made them almost immediately after seeing the sampler.  And they are SO GOOD!  They reminded me of corn muffins.  The lemony flavor is delicious and the millet adds a crunch, a much softer crunch than I thought it would.  Millet is one of those grains that is good for you, and you should eat it, but there's not all that much you can do with it.  I had some in the fridge (it's kinda old) so I will make these muffins to use it up.  They are super quick and easy, tasty and healthy.  Next time I will try using applesauce instead of some of the butter, just to see what happens.  Butter is good and all, but if I can cut down on it, I will feel better about eating two of these the minute they come out of the oven :)

Coming soon in my next post: photos from my brand-new digital SLR!  Yay!

Espresso Banana Muffins

I've been sick for the past week.  Horribly sick.  I haven't cooked ANYTHING all week.  We've eaten a lot of random takeout and a few things from the freezer, or simple stuff like pasta.  I've been dying to cook something, but still don't have all my energy back.  We had a whole bunch of bananas going brown on the counter, so I wanted to bake something with them.  It was between these Espresso Banana Muffins from Super Natural Cooking and the Moosewood brownies on the 101 Cookbooks website - both use espresso powder, which I got for Christmas and really wanted to use.  The muffins won (obviously).

The flavor profile is genius, but the texture is not for me.  That being said, I made some adjustments, so maybe I ruined them.  Or maybe they are just like that.  I only had sweetened french vanilla yogurt, so I reduced the sugar and vanilla to 1/2 cup and 1/2 tsp.  I'd like to try it the right way next time, and maybe add baking soda to see if I can get them to rise more.

See you in 2011!  :)

Hazelnut Muffins

It's hard to explain what these muffins taste like, but I can tell you how I felt when I first bit into one.

I was speechless.  It was almost a spiritual experience biting into this muffin - it was THAT good.  I never wanted to stop.  It was sweet and nutty, with a balanced whole grain flavor and a distinctive richness from the teff flour and brown butter.  The spices in the topping gave the plainer batter a twist.

I will be making these muffins again, and again, and again.  I never cease to be impressed by the recipes in Good to the Grain - if you've noticed, I hardly bake anything else at all, but I don't even want to.  I have a reasonable stash in the freezer already, but as soon as I run out, making a new batch will jump to the top of my to-do list.  This is one I will NOT mess with.

The crushed hazelnut, sugar and spice topping makes a bit extra, so I saved it and used it to top oatmeal - yummm :)

Carrot Muffins

As we are all well aware I love baking and I love baking whole grain muffins specifically.  These Carrot Muffins from Good to the Grain used spelt flour, which I haven't used until now.

I don't have too much to say about these, as I only ate one and the rest went in the freezer or were shared.

My carrots were too dry - the muffin was good, but a little on the dry side - my carrots must be pretty old.  I usually use a trick from Mark Bittman - cut them into carrot sticks, then fill the container with water.  This works pretty well, but when these were cut up, they went into two huge containers and I only remembered the next day to put water in, and only in one container.  Also, it was a pain to grate carrot sticks on a box grater.  Next time I will just go get more and use whole carrots - or the food processor!  What a fabulous invention.

The streusel topping on this was delicious - and although it's a LOT of extra calories I think it added a sweetness that the muffin itself was lacking.  I'd like to play around a little and find a way to add a little more sweetness to the muffin without using the streusel topping.

While I'm writing this I couldn't help but think of the Carrot Oatmeal Cookies I made for this past year's cookie exchange.  I would love to try the carrot/ginger/coconut flavor profile in a muffin form - this could be a great starting point for that recipe.  Maybe I can do a combination of this with the Ginger Peach Muffins to move toward that flavor profile.

Ginger Peach Muffins

I've been waiting to make the Ginger Peach Muffins from Good to the Grain since I first got the book back in March.  When delicious, ripe, juicy peaches started showing up at the markets, I broke out the recipe.

There was some hesitation from my primary taste tester, who doesn't like ginger (but will eat anything I make with it despite that preference).  The recipe includes both fresh ginger, used to saute the peaches, and crystallized ginger, which melts on the inside of the muffin.  The final product, perfectly moist when warm, tasted more like gingerbread than actual ginger - the whole was greater than the sum of the parts.

The peaches were delicious, of course - sliced, sauteed in honey, butter, and ginger, and stuck on top of the batter in the muffin cups.  After the first batch, though, we decided it would be an improvement to also dice some peaches up and mix them into the batter.  This was definitely an improvement upon an otherwise perfect recipe.  I thought it made a difference.

Another note - all of Kim's muffin recipes make weird numbers of muffins, usually 8-10 instead of the standard 12.  After the first batch, I decided I could easily stretch the batter to make 12 muffins, which is good for a number of reasons: 1, it makes more muffins; 2, each muffin is less calories; and 3, they are not ginormous and spilling all over the pan (like the first batch).  I found this to improve the quality of the final product as well and I will do it again next time.

Like every other recipe in Good to the Grain, I will be making this again.  YUM.

 

Molasses Bran Muffins

I am working my way through Good to the Grain, in case you haven't noticed.  It's going to take me a while, but at some point I'd like to try everything in the book.  Ken has been eating the Fig-Bran Muffins from So Easy and wanted me to make another bran muffin for when those run out.  My mind immediately snapped to these.

Like most of the recipes in this book, this is more time-consuming than most other recipes I've made or even read, but like the rest of the book, you're trading some extra time for extra quality.  The first step here is making a prune puree, which keeps the muffins moist.  You have to cook the prunes in orange juice, then puree them with an immersion blender.  I wasn't able to squeeze out enough OJ from the few oranges I had left, so I had to scale down the recipe, which made it much more difficult to puree.  Finally, though, with a little help, I got it pureed down enough.

The other minor roadblock I ran into was an error in the actual recipe.  One step mentions warming buttermilk on the stove to lukewarm.  Later, softened bran is mentioned with no indication as to how to soften it.  I put two and two together and mixed the warmed buttermilk into the bran, letting it sit for a few minutes before continuing with the recipe.  Next time I might let it sit a little longer.  I also messed up a little when adding the prune puree - I was supposed to mix it in thoroughly with the wet ingredients before adding them to the dry, but I forgot (oops) and added it in after.  I'd like to try it again the right way, though.

These muffins were yummy and I'm sure I'll be making them again.  Next time I'll prepare better so that I have the right amount of prune puree and can freeze the other half to make another batch of muffins.

Raspberry Lemon Muffins

To clean out my freezer, I decided to make muffins using my frozen fruit.  This obviously is an ass-backward idea, because muffins go back in the freezer and take up more room than fruit, but I like muffins so I did it anyway.  Ha!

Anyway, I made blueberry muffins, mostly following this recipe, which I used when I first started baking with whole grains over the summer.  After those were done, I took a look at what kind of fruit I had and settled on a raspberry-lemon combination for the next batch.  I have a wonderful book called The Flavor Bible where I go either for inspiration for flavor pairings, or to confirm my brilliant ideas (such as this one).  Raspberry and lemon was listed as a flavor affinity (a most popular combination) so I knew I was on track.

Following is the recipe I used.  You can see the original recipe here.

Ingredients
2 1/2 cups white whole wheat flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon fine grain sea salt
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
1 cup sugar (I used Florida Crystals less-refined sugar)
2 large eggs
zest of 1 lemon
1 cup plain low-fat yogurt (not Greek)
1 1/2 cups frozen raspberries

Directions

1. Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl.

2. Cream together the butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl until light and fluffy and almost white in color. Scrape down the bowl to make sure all the butter is incorporated, then add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the lemon zest and yogurt, and mix until incorporated.

3. Add the dry ingredients, mixing on low speed just until the batter is smooth. Scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl once more, to be sure everything is evenly combined. Gently fold in the fruit and refrigerate at least an hour.

4. Lightly grease a muffin tin or line with papers.

5. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C or gas mark 6). Scoop the batter into the prepared pan, piling it on and using every last bit.  Bake the muffins until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, approximately 24 minutes. Remove from the oven and tip the muffins over sideways in their cups as soon as possible to avoid a soggy bottom.  Move to a cooling rack after a few minutes to finish cooling.

Possible future variations: 1 tsp almond extract instead of the lemon zest, almonds sprinkled on top; substitute barley flour for part of the white whole wheat flour; use 1/2 raspberries and 1/2 blueberries.

Banana Cereal Muffins

This morning I made the Banana Cereal Muffins from Good to the Grain, my new favorite book. Written by Kim Boyce, a pastry chef turned stay at home mom, these recipes are designed for optimal performance rather than nutrition - something that always bothers me until I get to the delicious finished product. I plan to try the recipes as-is first, then begin to tinker a little to cut down on some of the all-purpose flour she uses. I'm not a pastry chef, so a flatter muffin top won't really bother me.

Some of the ingredients this recipe calls for: cracked multigrain hot cereal, whole-grain rye flour, bananas, molasses. Yum. The multigrain cereal, which I really bought with this recipe in mind, is actually delicious as a cereal if you like cream of wheat, oatmeal, etc. (which I do). I made it for breakfast (plain, with water only) and reserved the 1/2 cup needed for the muffins for when I had more time to make them. I made much more cereal than I could eat so I had it for breakfast for the next two days as well. I reheated it in the microwave with a generous splash of soymilk, which made it sweet enough for me. I hate ingredients that have only one purpose because they fill up my cabinets and refrigerator and then I spend hours looking for recipes to use them up.

I have never used rye flour before, which made it more interesting when I opened the bag and saw what it looked like - kind of like gravel. Yuck. But no, it was good in the muffins. I can understand why the recipe was written with 1 cup rye flour and 1 cup all-purpose flour as I don't know if I could stand the taste of rye alone.

I did forget an ingredient - a teaspoon of cinnamon. I had it sitting out on the counter after making oatmeal cookies the other day, and I thought to myself, "oh good, it's already out," and then I forgot to put it in. Fortunately the muffins are still delicious - I was very concerned when I realized what I'd left out halfway through the baking time. Molasses is a unique flavor of its own, which I think helped to save it, and so did the bananas. But next time I will include it and I do think it will be better that way.

Apple Walnut Muffins

All day today, I had this terrible urge to bake. I think it had something to do with the fact that my stockpile of frozen muffins is long gone. I had a few things in mind that I wanted to make. Some took too long, others I was missing just one or two ingredients for. Still others were just not what I was looking for (even though I didn't know what I was looking for). I got more and more antsy when I had a sudden breakthrough.

I wanted something that wasn't already spelled out for me on paper. I wanted to make a muffin, and I wanted some ideas of what should go in it. I turned to How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and I found exactly what I needed - an adaptable muffin recipe. Mark Bittman is my hero, for real. I am no scientist, so I can't just go throwing things together in the kitchen and expect them to turn into a muffin. I used his basic muffin recipe and changed it around to satisfy my desires.


Ingredients:
2 cups white whole wheat flour
1/4 cup turbinado sugar
1/2 tsp fine grain sea salt
3 tsp baking powder
3 Tbsp melted butter
1 egg
1 cup milk
1 Granny Smith apple, peeled and grated
1/2 cup walnuts, roughly chopped

Directions: Bake in muffin cups at 400* until you stick in a toothpick and it comes out clean.

The resulting muffin was like a light, delicate cake. If you are looking for a cupcake, look elsewhere. It was almost like a biscuit or a slightly sweet bread. The apple strands were visible, but underrepresented flavor-wise. What a fascinating recipe this was... I can't stop thinking of variations. Different types of flour, different spices, different nuts and maybe fruits. Here, I will stick to some of the variations I would like to make using the apple/walnut flavor profile.
- Mini-muffins = tea cakes!
- Add spices (Pampered Chef Cinnamon Plus spice blend?)
- More/different types of apple
- Grating with the skins on (particularly some deep red ones)
- Brown sugar... muscovado in particular
- Natural sweeteners (honey, agave nectar)
- Rolled oats

Blueberry Sour Cream Muffins

In case you haven't yet noticed, I love muffins. When we went to Whole Foods on Friday I found 32 oz of delicious blueberries for $6 and decided to make a double batch of my favorite (so far) muffin recipe, which you can see here. You are probably wondering how I can eat these every day and not feel bad about it. My conscience doesn't mind because these muffins are mostly whole wheat! Plus, blueberries are SO good for you. How are my muffins so very white and pretty if they are whole wheat? Well, because I use white whole wheat flour, which has a lighter color and consistency than regular whole wheat flour. It's great for baking for that reason. You can also get whole wheat pastry flour which might be better for certain recipes. The recipe calls for a little bit of all-purpose flour also, which I think can be substituted with the white whole wheat flour for a 100% whole wheat muffin, but I love these muffins too much to take the risk of messing them up. As you can see, my muffins are full of berries, and I still only used half of the blueberries making a double batch. One thing I like about this recipe is that the batter will keep for a few days in the refrigerator. If you like freshly baked muffins, you can make this on Sunday and bake a few at a time for the next few days. I am out of muffin papers, so I was only able to make one dozen muffins. Like my other muffins, these freeze very nicely. Just wrap in plastic wrap individually, put them all in a gallon size ziplock bag (I like to label mine with a description and the date), and toss in the freezer. You can have a muffin on the go! If you have to wait 2 hours before eating it, like me, it will defrost itself. If you want it right away, you can just pop it in the toaster oven (or even the microwave) to warm it up like it just came out of the oven. This is an easy recipe and the sour cream makes the muffins really moist and creamy. If you don't freeze them, store them in the refrigerator. It is blueberry season in our area right now and it won't be for long so this is a great way to use them so that you can have some blueberry goodness later in the winter.

Quinoa Corn Muffins

Today I spent the day grocery shopping/cooking with my big, Montana. In the morning I went to pick up everything we needed at the farmers' market. I also stopped at Stop & Shop and got 9 boxes of pasta for $2.90. (I will probably go back to get more!)

We decided that I would make a quick light lunch, then we would make a baked pasta dish and a muffin. (All will be posted here!) All were some funky kitchen experiments that I have been plotting for weeks. The most experimental were the Quinoa Corn Muffins (you can see the recipe here).

The recipe calls for sprouted quinoa. This was strange. You just rinse the raw quinoa seeds, then soak them overnight, and they sprout. As in, they start to grow into a plant. As you can imagine this was a very new concept to me, although apparently it is very common among people who only eat raw foods. But I decided to try it anyway because the recipe suggested that they would be easier to puree for the recipe if they were sprouted, which turned out to be true. I also tried using agave nectar as my sweetener. I didn't really notice anything in the muffins, but they turned out to not be too sweet anyway and I used 2 Tbsp of agave nectar.

Sometimes I get very engrossed in my cooking and I forget to take pictures. Sorry! The final result was interesting. This recipe did not taste like a corn muffin at all. It had its own flavor. Not bad, but not a corn muffin, and not sweet at all - more like a bread you would eat with some kind of soup, maybe. We tried them with a little almond butter, which dominated over the flavor of the muffin, and we also concluded that it would be good with a fruit spread, or if you added cranberries when baking (very Thanksgiving-ish). I might try making these again, but if I do I will probably use about half as much quinoa and twice as much cornmeal. One benefit, though, is that the quinoa is a complete protein, so this is a good vegetarian source of protein if that's what you're looking for. I think this might be a little too natural-foods for me, and I will need to adjust the recipe if I make it again. I might also add a little more sweetener! Also, judging by how little the muffins rose I think it's time for new baking powder...

Banana Bran Muffins

I have been eating blueberry muffins every day at work for about the past month. Even if I eat before I leave the house, I am starving by the time I get to work. I love this morning ritual of having a delicious fruity whole wheat muffin with my latte. Sadly, I am getting just a little bit bored of blueberry muffins after a whole month of them, and blueberries aren't getting any cheaper either. I have been looking at a variety of muffin recipes lately, particularly healthy ones, and I have seen wheat bran as an ingredient in many. I decided to pick some up so I would have it in case I found one I wanted to try. Last night, I really wanted to make muffins, so I looked for recipes using ingredients I had already - frozen bananas and wheat bran. I found this recipe for Banana Bran Muffins, and conveniently found a small amount of walnuts hanging out in my snack cabinet.

This recipe seems pretty healthy already, since banana and wheat bran are pretty healthy things. But it still calls for all-purpose flour, so of course I had to replace 1 cup with white whole wheat flour. White whole wheat flour is one of my favorite healthy things, because you can barely tell the difference! My blueberry muffins come out still looking like I used all-purpose flour.

The frozen bananas were a little bit of a disaster. I have read online that you can use them in baking and they supposedly work really well because they are already very mushy. However, I thought I was going to get frostbite from handling these things. The recipe called for three of these suckers, and most of my time spent on this recipe was spent wrestling these bananas, trying to peel off the skin so it wouldn't get in my muffins. The most success I had was by slicing on the inside curve from the top to bottom and then kind of peeling it off. (Think of what you see people on Food Network doing to make stuffed plantains.) I ended up with a plate full of gunk that I had to scrape off of these bananas. I will definitely be doing some more research to see how others overcome these problems. I would have taken a picture of this catastrophe, but you would probably lose your appetite!

Another issue I had was that the butter wasn't really soft enough, and the brown sugar was too attached to itself. These two things had to be creamed together until fluffy. They were fluffy, but the bottom of the mixing bowl was coated in sticky brown sugar, which just would not scrape off with the poor overworked spatula. This resulted in some little spots of brown sugar on my muffins. It wasn't enough to ruin them, but I would like to not have this problem again.

When I finally got all this working, I put the walnuts in my beautiful food processor to chop them up. Some got a little too chopped. I'm going to have to work out the logistics of this machine to get it right. I didn't measure the walnuts. I don't measure my blueberries in muffins either. I don't think it's necessary. If you have more goodness one time than another, so be it! You can easily see whether you have enough, so why dirty another measuring cup?

I put the muffins in the oven and baked them for about 22 minutes. I find that to usually be the optimum cooking time for muffins. One thing that is tricky about banana muffins is the gooeyness of bananas in general. It is harder to test with a toothpick, because you might get a stick full of banana goo when your batter is actually fully cooked. I think that may be the case here, because they are just slightly on the dry side. I will have to think of a way to moisten them up for next time. I am considering using some ground flax seed. This is easy to add to anything - you just grind it in a coffee grinder, and sprinkle it on whatever you want. According to my research you really need to grind it to get the optimal benefit.


So, the muffins came out yummy. I took them out of the pan and put them on a cooling rack so they could cool more evenly. They seemed very greasy on the bottoms so I put them on a paper towel to absorb that moisture. When they were fully cooled, I individually wrapped them in plastic wrap and put half in a bag in the freezer, and left the other half out to eat in the next few days. When freezing muffins, it's best to do it sooner rather than later so that you preserve the quality for when you decide to eat them.