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Bread

Sour Cream Carrot Breakfast Muffins

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I know it seems too soon to post another muffin recipe, but the Tropical Muffins are gone, because my husband was eating them two and three at a time. Well, these are not so sweet, with only half the sugar, and they contain the one secret ingredient that will curb his appetite—cinnamon. I can’t understand who wouldn’t like cinnamon, but there it is, and I use it to my own benefit sometimes.

In addition to sour cream and carrots, there are chopped walnuts and flaked unsweetened coconut, so there are plenty of flavors and textures in these muffins—they’re just not sweet ones. None of the additions—carrots, coconut, nuts, sour cream—are sweet, except for the brown sugar. I think the muffins would be great with some cream cheese and a nice big cup of coffee in the morning. You could certainly sweeten them up with different additions or with a sweet spread. I just wanted something hearty for breakfast.

Sour Cream Carrot Breakfast Muffins

  • Servings: 12 muffins
  • Difficulty: easy
  • Print

Preheat oven to 375°; prepare a muffin pan with paper liners or butter.

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, salted or unsalted, at room temperature
  • 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup sour cream
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoons cinnamon
  • 2 cups shredded carrots
  • 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
  • 1/2 cup unsweetened flaked coconut

Preparation

  1. Beat butter and brown sugar until light and fluffy. Add sour cream and egg and continue beating until well combined.
  2. Stir in dry ingredients—flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon—just until lightly combined.
  3. Add carrots, nuts, and coconut and mix until well combined. The batter will be thick.
  4. Scoop the better into the muffin cups—it should mound high in the cups, but it will not spread out or run over.
  5. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. 25 minutes worked for me.

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Cookies, Dessert

Chewy Cherry Pecan Cookies

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This cookie is pretty much like your favorite chewy chocolate chip cookie, but with dried cherries and pecans.

I have both unsweetened dried Bing cherries and unsweetened dried tart Montmorency cherries; either would make a good cookie, but with all the sugar and vanilla, I felt the cookie could stand the tartness—and it does. I don’t think my pictures do the cookies justice, but maybe a picture never does. My chocolate-loving husband thinks they are great, but he warns you that if you eat too much dried fruit, you’ll get a tummy ache!

Dried tart cherries
Thick batter and 2 oz scoop

Chewy Cherry Pecan Cookies

  • Servings: makes 1 1/2 dozen large cookies
  • Difficulty: easy
  • Print

Preheat oven to 350°; line cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Ingredients
  • 2 cups dried tart cherries—pour boiling water over cherries to cover. Wait 5 minutes, then drain.
  • 1 stick butter at room temperature
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar or equivalent sugar substitute
  • 1/2 cup dark brown sugar or equivalent sugar substitute (sugar substitutes may affect final cookie texture)
  • 1 large egg
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla
  • 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup pecans, roughly chopped
Preparation
  1. Beat butter and sugars in bowl of stand mixer until light and fluffy. Mix in egg and vanilla until until well combined.
  2. Slowly beat in dry ingredients—flour, soda, and salt—until well combined.
  3. Mix in pecans until combined, then add drained cherries. The cherries will be moist and soft, so overmixing could break them up; it’s better to mix them in with a large wooden spoon.
  4. Scoop dough with a 2 oz scoop onto lined cookie sheets, about 2 inches apart. I put 6 on each sheet.
  5. Bake for 15 minutes until browned. Cookies will be soft and mounded. Let cool on cookie sheet about five minutes before removing to cooling rack to cool completely.

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Bread, Cakes, Dessert

Oatmeal Cranberry Walnut Muffins

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This is a merging of two recipes in my old Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cook Book (1961): “Cranberry-Orange Muffins” (p. 88) and “Oatmeal Muffins” (p. 90). The recipes are so similar in amounts of ingredients, that it didn’t take much to combine them. The only big decision I had to make was whether to use white or brown sugar, so I compromised and used half of each. Oatmeal takes the place of half the flour in the cranberry muffins, a formula you can use to add oatmeal to a variety of muffin recipes.

Soaking oats in almond milk
Cranberries and walnuts
…chopped
Finished muffins

Oatmeal Cranberry Walnut Muffins

  • Servings: 12 muffins
  • Difficulty: easy
  • Print

Preheat oven to 400°; line a muffin pan with paper liners or butter the cups.

Ingredients
  • 1 cup old fashioned rolled oats
  • 1 cup almond milk (or any kind of milk, even buttermilk)
  • 1 cup fresh cranberries (thawed, if frozen)
  • 1/2 cup shelled walnuts
  • 1/3 cup softened butter
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup white granulated sugar
  • 1 large egg
  • orange zest from one large orange
  • 1 cup all purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon salt
Preparation
  1. Mix oats and milk; let soak for about 20 minutes while you prepare the other ingredients.
  2. Add cranberries and walnuts to the bowl of a food processor and pulse about 10 times until the ingredients are roughly chopped. Don’t worry about uniformity.
  3. Cream butter, sugars, and egg in the bowl of a mixer until creamy. Mix in orange zest.
  4. Add dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt) and oat/milk mixture. Carefully mix on low speed until combined.
  5. Stir in cranberry/walnut mixture.
  6. Fill muffin cups at least 2/3 full.
  7. Bake for 20-25 minutes. Remove muffins to rack to cool.

Bread

Apple Oat Bran Muffins

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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.

Apple Oat Bran Muffins

  • Servings: 6-8 jumbo muffins
  • Difficulty: easy
  • Print

Preheat oven to 350°; butter a muffin tin or use paper liners.

Dry ingredients:

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup whole grain rolled oats

1 1/2 cups wheat bran (I used Bob’s Red Mill miller’s wheat bran)

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt (the recipe said 1/4 teaspoon)

1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda

Wet ingredients:

2 cups buttermilk (I used dried buttermilk, reconstituted)

1 beaten egg

1/2 cup molasses

4 tablespoons melted butter (the recipe said 2-4)

Additions:

1/2-3/4 cup chopped walnuts

3/4 cup unsweetened dried apples, roughly chopped (I probably could have chopped mine a little more)

  1. Combine the dry and wet ingredients separately; then mix them together until most of the dry ingredients are moist.
  2. Fold in the nuts and apples, mixing until all is combined. I used a stand mixer to mix all together just until combined. This is a wetter batter than the one that is all whole wheat.
  3. Scoop the batter into greased tins 3/4 full and bake for about 25 minutes.