Recipes Discovered

Orange-Cranberry Muffin Recipe

Lemon Poppy Seed Muffin Recipe

Continuing on my healthy muffin quest, I made two more batches of muffins today.

The first recipe was an Orange-Cranberry muffin. The recipe called for half whole wheat flour and half all purpose flour (similar to the Apple Pecan muffins), but it used fat-free yogurt instead of buttermilk. There is only 2 tablespoons of oil in this recipe, which is surprising, but I’ll get to that later. The recipe calls for a half cup of sugar, which is twice as much as the previous recipes. To try to make up for this, I used a container of Danon Light and Fit Vanilla Yogurt (there are only 7 grams of sugar per container), but since they are only 6 ounce containers, I also added 2 tablespoons of plain fat-free yogurt. Also, the recipe calls for fresh cranberries but I had half a bag of dried cranberries begging to be used, so I used those instead. >>The first big difference I noticed was in the batter itself. It was very thick, as opposed to the batters from the previous muffin, which were thin. This was definitely not a pourable batter. I had to use a spoon to get it into the muffin tins. I again made mini muffins, so baking time on this recipe was only about 9 minutes. The taste of these muffins was very good – the orange and cranberry went really well together. Unfortunately, and ‘ guessing it’s because there is so little oil in them, they are very dry. I think if you add this flavor to the Oatmeal Peach muffins, you would have a winner.

The second recipe for today was Lemon Poppy Seed Mini Muffins. This recipe called for butter instead of canola oil like all the other recipes, but I just thought they sounded good and figured I would throw them in the mix since the recipe also uses yogurt similar to the Orange Cranberry muffins. I don’t use cake flour, so the standard substitution is 1 cup minus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour for 1 cup of cake flour. Also, to try to make them a little on the healthy side, I substited half cup of whole wheat flour for the half cup of all-purpose flour. The batter for these muffins was thick, similar to the Orange c. I used a spoon to get the batter into the tins. The recipe said it makes 2 dozen mini muffins, but I got 32 muffins from a batch. That was filling the muffin tins to the top too (they didn’t raise very much like the other muffins). They were moist though, and a little sticky. The flavor was very intense. Overall, they were good, but not my favorite of the muffins.

So what is my conclusion of all these muffin recipes? Based on the 4 that I made, the Apple Pecan muffin was probably my favorite. I really did like the flavor of the Orange Cranberry and the texture of the Oatmeal Peach. I think I will have to experiment combining those two recipes.