Bran Flax Muffins

One day in the grocery store I happened to pick up a bag of Bob's Red Mill flaxseed meal, looked at the bag and saw two things that interested me. 1) A delicious looking recipe for Bran Flax Muffins. 2) That you can use flaxseed meal combined with water as an egg substitute. I eat eggs and so does my whole family, but there are others that can't eat eggs, so I'm going to experiment with another recipe to see if I can eliminate the eggs.

Anyway, back to the muffins. I barely changed anything from the recipe on the back of the bag. I reduced the amount of sugar, added a little more cinnamon, and reduced the amount of nuts.

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

3/4 cup Bob's Red Mill flaxseed meal

3/4 cup oat bran

2 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 1/2 cups shredded carrots (about 3-4)

2 macintosh apples, peeled, cored and shredded

1/2 cup golden raisins

3/4 cup chopped pecans

2/3 cup brown sugar

2 eggs

3/4 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix together the flour, flaxseed meal, oat bran, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon in a large bowl. Stir in the carrots, apples, raisins, and pecans. In another bowl whisk the eggs and brown sugar until sugar dissolves. Whisk in the milk and vanilla. Pour the liquid ingredients over the dry ingredients and stir until combined. Divide evenly into 18 greased muffin cups. Bake for 15-20 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Optional: I don't give Adeline (my one year old) raisins or nuts yet, so I mix everything together but the raisins and nuts. I fill three muffin cups with the non-raisin and non-nut batter, then I stir in the raisins and nuts and fill the rest of the muffin cups.

Orange-Poppy Seed Muffins

I made these muffins on Sunday and they were quite good. I think I might prefer lemon-poppy seed muffins, but I'm not sure. These had a delicious orange glaze that I drizzled over the top and I'm not sure you can go wrong with a little burst of sugar. If this recipe was available online, I'd share it, but since it isn't, I can't. It's from Williams-Sonoma Essentials of Baking: Recipes and Techniques for Succcessful Home Baking, which is a very good cookbook. Even though some of the recipes from this cookbook are available online, I'd still say it's been worthwhile for me to own. For starters, I really enjoy browsing through cookbooks and magazines to find recipes to try. The other reason it's been useful is that I think it wasn't until I got this cookbook that I really understood the meaning of soft peaks and stiff peaks with respect to beating egg whites.

One thing to note with this recipe is that I think there's a typo either in the written instructions or the ingredient list. The amount of orange juice in the ingredient list is 1/2 cup and in the written instructions it's 1/4 cup. I used 1/4 cup and the muffins were good, so if I make these again, I'll stick with 1/4 cup.

Pear-Ginger Muffins

I love these muffins! This recipe is from Williams-Sonoma Essentials of Baking: Recipes and Techniques for Succcessful Home Baking. It's an excellent cookbook -- I highly recommend it. The original recipe is also available on the Williams-Sonoma website.

As usual, I made a few changes to the recipe. The main change I made to this recipe is that I do not consider brown sugar to be a dry ingredient. Whenever I've added brown sugar to the dry ingredients, I seem to get some clumps, so I always add it to the moist ingredients. Here's the recipe as I made it:

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 heaping teaspoon ground ginger

2/3 cup chopped crystallized ginger

2 large eggs

2/3 cup packed dark brown sugar

1 tablespoon peeled and grated (or minced) fresh ginger

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

1 cup whole milk

1 large pear, chopped

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Prepare a muffin pan by coating the muffin cups with cooking spray.

In a bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and ground ginger. Stir in about 1/3 cup of the chopped crystallized ginger.

In another bowl, whisk the eggs until blended. Add the brown sugar and the fresh ginger. Whisk in the melted butter and then the milk. Pour over the dry ingredients and stir with a rubber spatula just until moistened. Fold in the pear.

Spoon the batter into the prepared muffin cups, evenly dividing the batter over all 12 cups. Sprinkle the remaining crystallized ginger over the tops. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean, about 15 minutes. Let cool in the pan on a wire cooling rack for 2 minutes, then remove the muffins from the pan and continue cooling on the wire rack. Serve warm. Makes 12 muffins.

Prep time (not including baking): about 30 minutes