Recipes Discovered

Banana Crunch Muffins

Since Seth loves banana, and I had a few very ripe bananas that needed to be used up, I decided to make banana muffins. The batter is very similar to a banana cake batter, with the addition of walnuts, coconut, and granola. The granola seems a little odd, but it gives the muffins a nice crunch. The muffins are really moist and wonderful on their own, no need for frosting. And I had much better luck getting the paper off these muffins than with the apple crumb muffins.

Apple Crumb Muffins Recipe

Seth wanted an apple cake and I wanted a coffee cake, so somehow we compromised on these Apple Crumb Muffins. The muffins are simple to make, since they are made from a standard crumb cake batter (with chopped apples), just baked in muffins tins. The topping is butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, and pecans. One of the recipes I read called for melting the butter in the topping, which I thought kind of made sense since it would be easier to mix together. Do not do it! Because the butter was already melted. the topping just ran off the muffins instead of making a crunchy top, and it made some kind of glue that fused the muffins to the paper liners making it nearly impossible to get the paper off without destroying the muffins. On the upside, the muffins taste really good. They are very moist, and aren’t overly sweet. Just watch out for the paper while you are eating them.

Banana Berry Muffins Recipe

My aunt had some late blooming blueberries that I picked the other day, and I thought they would be perfect in these Banana Berry Muffins.

The recipe first combines bran flakes and buttermilk. For the buttermilk, I substituted 1/2 tablespoon of vinegar and 1/2 cup of regular milk. I let it sit in a bowl for 5 minutes and then added the bran flakes on top. It didn’t seem like enough milk, but I mixed the flakes with the milk and after they set for 10 minutes, the flakes were pretty mushy.

For the batter, I creamed butter and sugar together and then added the eggs one at a time. To that mixture, I added mashed bananas and vanilla. The recipe calls for ripe bananas. My grandmother always used totally black bananas to make banana bread, and I still think that creates the best flavor. The bananas I used weren’t all black, but they were definitely a bit beyond good eating. Anyway, the batter looked pretty gross as this point, like it was curdled, but as I stirred in (by hand) the dry ingredients, the batter smoothed out. >> Read more

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. >> Read more

Apple Pecan Muffin Recipe

Oatmeal Peach Muffin Recipe

I got a request the other day for a healthy dessert. It had to be something that Seth could take with him to work though, so fresh fruit desserts were out of the question. I decided to try muffins. I found a few different recipes that used different ingredients to make them “healthy”, so I figured I would make a couple batches of mini muffins and see which ones turned out the best.

The first recipes I tried was an Apple Pecan Muffin. The recipe used half whole-wheat flour and half all-purpose flour, applesauce, low-fat buttermilk and canola oil to lighten them up. A Golden Delicious apple is diced up and added to the batter (I’ve never had a Golden Delicious apple before, but they are really good!). I did make some substitutions in the recipe. It called for whole wheat pastry flour, which I couldn’t find, so I just used regular whole wheat flour. I also don’t keep buttermilk on hand, so I just added a tablespoon of lemon juice to a cup of milk and let it sit for 5 minutes. Works just as well. Since I was making mini muffins, I only baked them about 10 minutes. The muffins turned out really good. They had a great flavor without being too sweet. I think the pecan and sugar topping really enhanced the muffins. They were a little dense (maybe the pastry flour would have made them lighter?) but they were very moist for only having a little bit of oil in them. So far, so good. >> Read more