Apple Oatmeal Muffins

I'm doing a great job this week of using up things in my kitchen. I discovered today that I have everything I needed to cobble together these apple oatmeal muffins. I'll post the link to the original recipe followed by my alterations. These are not too sweet, and my version is full of whole wheat and oats. They smell great in the oven, and they're cute to boot! Here they are with a pot of tea and some minneola oranges from this week's produce delivery box.

Link to Recipezaar's original recipe

My version (IMPORTANT: if you're going shopping for ingredients anyway, you might want to follow the original recipe. If you have things you want to use up, feel free to follow either recipe that fits what you have in your kitchen. This recipe was a lesson in the seldom-remembered fact that recipes are made to be tweaked):

• 1 cup steel cut oats (soak in warm water while the other ingredients are being assembled, then squeeze out water before you use. Don't worry about oversoaking. In fact, cook them if you want the muffins to be completely soft. I liked the slight hardness of these in mine, sort of like chewy bran muffins)
• 1 cup apples (I coarsely grated them this time, but I did not like the long shreds at all. Next time I'll either cube the apples and soften them a bit in the microwave so there are actually pieces in the muffins, or finely grate them so they're just there for flavor)
• 1/2 cup Mexican crema (instead of yogurt)
• 2 tablespoons canola oil
• 1 large beaten egg

• 2/3 cup maple syrup (all natural, please)
• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 2/3 + 1/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour (long story short, I read the recipe wrong and needed to add 1/4 more flour after I added 1 cup total to begin with. No big deal, in most breakfast breads you can substitute in whole wheat pastry flour completely without anyone noticing the difference. Much healthier for you, and tasty too. But it has to be whole wheat pastry flour, not just whole wheat)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1/3 cup raisins, soaked in rum and drained (I only put these in half)
• 1 Tablespoon cinnamon (I didn't think about this until too late, but would add it next time)
• I'm trying to figure out how I could increase the protein in these with powder or tofu
• next time I will definitely use walnuts too. I missed having nuts in these

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

Sift dry ingredients together. Beat wet ingredients together, and stir in oats and apples. Fold the wet ingredients gently into the dry ingredients. Don't over mix, as this will cause gluten strands to form. The result will be dense dry muffins. You want to mix just until the liquid is absorbed completely into the flour.

Divide batter among 12 large muffin cups. I don't have large muffin cups, so I made 12 cupcakes and then added some raisins to the remainder of the batter to make 4 rum raisin cupcakes. Don't forget to fill the empty cupcake tins halfway with water to promote even baking. The raisin ones puffed more (increased moisture), but both were great.

Bake at 400 degrees until a toothpick inserted into the center of a cupcake comes out dry. For my little muffins this took almost exactly 20 minutes.

Edit: because great minds think alike, my friend Pam also baked apple oatmeal muffins last night. We swear, it was a coincidence. Her recipe was from a different source, and she lives on the other side of the country. Here are hers in all their glory! From what I can gather, her recipe used brown sugar and cubed apples. I like how they're puffier than mine.

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