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
- Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Grease muffin tin.
- Mix dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, spices).
- Cream together the margarine and 1/2 cup brown sugar (setting the other 1/4 c. aside). Add buttermilk and mix, not too hard.
- Add dry into wet, adding more buttermilk to thin batter as needed. Mix in apple pieces.
- 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.
- 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?