Apple Muffins

This worked surprisingly well…there were a few glitches, all my fault.

Recipe from here with some alterations (most notably the egg was omitted, other changes are bolded, compare to original recipe).

Makes 18.

Ingredients

  • 2 cups whole wheat flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 T cinnamon
  • a pinch of ginger and pumpkin pie spice
  • 1/2 cup margarine (I use yoghurt-based margarine so I won’t die of trans-fats)
  • 1/2 cup (3 1/2 ounces) granulated sugar omitted
  • 3/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1 large egg, lightly beaten omitted
  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • 4 large apples, peeled, cored, and chopped

Methodology

  1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.  Grease muffin tin.
  2. Mix dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, spices).
  3. Cream together the margarine and 1/2 cup brown sugar (setting the other 1/4 c. aside).  Add buttermilk and mix, not too hard.
  4. Add dry into wet, adding more buttermilk to thin batter as needed.  Mix in apple pieces.
  5. Spoon about 1/3 c. of batter into each muffin compartment on the muffin sheet*.  Sprinkle a little of the remaining brown sugar on top of each one.  These don’t rise much, so don’t be afraid to fill the muffins pretty full.
  6. Bake 10 minutes at 450 F, then reduce temperature to 400 F and bake another 5 minutes or so.  Let the muffins cool for a while (10-15 min?) before removing them, since they will be fragile until cooled.

Notes

  • I wanted to use up some apples, so I doubled the apples in the recipe without doubling the rest of the recipe.  That was a mistake…there was so much apple that the muffin part didn’t hold together well, especially when I first took them out of the oven.  So I would say if you want to use more apples, make a 1 1/2 batch, not a single.  That would probably handle the additional 2 apples well.
  • Leaving out the egg was not a problem.  Usually in quick breads and stuff that uses buttermilk, eggs aren’t really necessary.
    And I don’t really cook with them much, so I didn’t feel like buying any, since if I bought half a dozen eggs, five of them would wind up sitting around.  This did fine with just buttermilk.
  • Also, the reduced sugar was good.  They were more breakfast-y muffins, not really the tiny apple cakes I’d been hoping for.  Next time if I’m making these for dessert, I might add a little more sugar.  But the apples are so sweet it hardly needs it.  I guess it’s dumb for me to complain that something is too healthy.

*Is there a better name for this?