Muffins are a “quick bread:” they rise because of an acid/base reaction between baking soda and baking powder, and an acidic agent such as buttermilk or yoghurt.
Basic principles in making good muffins:
** Get your muffin tins prepared before you start making the batter. Once you combine wet and dry ingredients, you need to work quickly to get the batter into the pans, and the pans into the oven
** Put the dry ingredients in a bowl, and then quickly add the wet ingredients.
** Mix just enough to get the dry ingredients wet: if you mix too much, the muffins will be tough.
** When done, remove from the muffin pan as soon as reasonably possible, and cool on a rack.
These muffins are “BFL compatible” because they use only BFL approved ingredients: sweetening comes from applesauce (unsweetened, or sweetened with apple juice), and there’s just a tiny bit of fat (canola oil).
These muffins will not be as light and fluffy as bakery muffins: fat makes baked goods soft and fluffy, protein makes baked good tough.
Below is the basic (master) muffin recipe, which is pretty bland, plus ideas for flavors.
BASIC MUFFINS
1. preheat oven to 350 degrees. Oil muffin tin (12 muffins) lightly with canola oil. Even if you use a silicon muffin pan (the best!) oil lightly.
2. in a bowl, thoroughly mix:
½ cup whole oats (ie, oatmeal)
1 cup oats, ground finely in the blender (making oat flour)
½ cup whole wheat flour
½ t salt
1 t baking soda
1 t baking powder
3. in the blender combine:
1 cup nonfat yoghurt (either plain or vanilla sweetened with Splenda)
3 egg whites
1 whole egg
½ cup unsweetened applesauce (or sweetened with apple juice)
good slug of vanilla (~1T)
2 packets Splenda if you like really sweet muffins
4. quickly pour the wet ingredients into the dry and mix with a spoon or spatula, just enough to wet the ingredients – maybe 10 seconds. You should see the mixture start to bubble as the acid/base reaction takes place.
5. put about 1/3 cup of batter into each cup – they can be about 2/3 full.
6. bake for 20-22 minutes, or until knife comes out clean
7. cool on rack. Refrigerate in an airtight container.
FLAVOR IDEAS
Spice muffins: add 2 t of Pumpkin Pie spice and 2 t of cinnamon to the dry ingredients. Use more spice to taste (I use more cinnamon, about 4 t)
Lemon poppyseed muffins: add 1 T (heaping) of poppyseeds to the dry ingedients, and 1 T pure lemon extract to the liquid inredients. Replace vanilla with almond extract if you wish.
Chocolate muffins. Add ¼ cup of dark cocoa (read the ingredients: just cocoa, or cocoa processed with alkali, no sugar!) to the wet ingredients. The cocoa will add about 1 gram of carbs per muffin. You may wish to add more Splenda for a sweeter muffin.
SERVING SIZE
Each muffin is about 13g of carbs, and 80 calories. That works out to about 1 muffin for a females’s meal, probably 2 muffins for a male’s meal.
Quick meal: muffin + nonfat cottage cheese
Cooked breakfast: eggbeater omlette + muffin with sugar-free raspberry preserves
