Remember when I took my go-to Quick Banana Bread and turned it into  Whole Wheat Oatmeal Banana Bread? It turned out very well, and it wasn’t the first time I had started with the simple recipe and made simple changes to achieve a different taste or texture. I changed it up once by taking out the banana and adding pumpkin for Skip the Bananas, Add Pumpkin: Nut Bread. I even used it to make Espresso Banana Walnut Bread. You get the point: one basic recipe that you like and that works is just waiting to help you make something new.

I’m in love with Buttermilk Bran Muffins, making them all the time to put in the freezer, so I can pop out just one for lunch whenever I’m in the mood. I love the strong sweetness of molasses and raisins, and the hearty combination of whole wheat flour and wheat bran. As I said in the original post, they are not really a dessert muffin, but they are just the kind of sweetness I like. So, it’s not that I need to make the recipe better; I just wanted to see how well it would adapt to a few other flavors. I made only a few changes to achieve a differently sweet muffin with a lighter crumb:

• I replaced the raisins with roughly chopped unsweetened dried apples—the moist kind, not the crispy apple chips
• I replaced the 2 cups whole wheat flour with 1 cup of the flour and 1 cup of whole grain rolled oats

That’s all. I kept the original wheat bran, the buttermilk, the molasses, etc. The resulting muffins have an interesting chewiness from the apples, and the oats made the muffin crumb a little more crumbly, but still moist. Most surprisingly, the molasses doesn’t dominate as it does in the original; I was worried that it would be too strong against the apple, but the apple and molasses create a totally different sweetness in this muffin.