Strawberry - Blueberry Muffins | Recipe

 

The other day Fluxxdog and I got to talking about muffins and how, early in our relationship, I used to make peach muffins for him to take to work to eat for lunch. I had found a recipe for blueberry-peach muffins and asked him if he'd like to give it a try. Well, unfortunately, this is not the season for peaches. Luckily Veonoss found strawberries for us to try. Originally I was tempted to use the blueberry-peach muffin recipe and just replace "peaches" with "strawberries". Then I found a recipe specifically for blueberry-strawberry muffins and decided to give it a shot.

Unlike a lot of recipes I'm used to, this one calls for veggie oil instead of butter. It also uses a significant amount flour. After I had mixed in most of the dry ingredients, I started to worry about this recipe as the "batter" was looking more like "dough" and had a stickier consistency than I like.

Even after adding the fruit, I wasn't getting the consistency that I thought I would need for muffins. I started looking at the comments of the recipe and saw that a lot of people needed to do variations on the recipe to get it how they wanted. One person added an extra egg, another replaced the sugar with brown sugar, etc. However, there were enough people saying the recipe was fine on its own that I decided to keep going. 

After I added the strawberry jam and kept mixing it for several more minutes, the batter started to look and feel more like actual batter.

I was still very nervous about how the muffins would turn out. I was tempted to look up a cinnamon roll icing recipe to add if they weren't tasty or sweet enough. Fortunately, though, the recipe held up. Fluxxdog, Veonoss and I were able to make a good breakfast out of these. They tasted even better with coffee. So, I think I'll go ahead and add this recipe to the list of keepers. Next time I'll see about replacing the strawberry jam with blueberry and see what happens.

Fried Apple Muffins | Recipe

As many of you know, I recently switched jobs. Before I left my old job, however, a coworker gave me a new recipe book!

Seriously, thanks Kathy!

In this book there was a recipe for Vanilla Cupcakes and I thought that would be a good recipe to start out with. Something simple. But I wanted to do something special for the frosting since, plain vanilla doesn't always sound good. I wanted something that would mix well with the vanilla flavoring. Long story short, I ended up going for Apple-Vanilla Cupcakes with Apple Spice Frosting. They were a huge hit. However, my taste testers and I noted that these were good even without the frosting. And what do we call cupcakes without frosting? Muffins!!! So I opted to try to make some Apple Muffins this time around.

Naturally, the first step is to slice and dice the apples. I learned with the cupcakes that two apples work better than one. Also, not much of a surprise, but granny smith apples are perfect for this.

Next up were the seasonings. I was tempted to buy some apple spice seasoning from the store, but it was $5 for a tiny jar. I read the ingredients and decided I could improvise my own. It really is just nutmeg, allspice and cinnamon. With the cupcakes I had used these seasonings in the frosting. For the muffins, I'm mixing them into the mix to fry up with the apples.

A pinch (1/16 tsp) of ground nutmeg, allspice, and cinnamon on top of brown sugar and regular sugar.

 Then it was time to fry up the apples. I had never done this before, never thought of it before, but Fluxxdog agreed to show how it was done. We melted some butter on the stove, added the apple pieces and then threw in the mix with it. Made the entire apartment smell so good!

In the meantime, I made up a nice, simple batter using the usual ingredients. Though I will admit, there were more eggs in this recipe than I'm used to. After the apples were fried, we went ahead and mixed them in.

Then I spooned the batter into their containers. I always try to be careful, but the darn batter still gets everywhere.

Then after about 8 minutes, the muffins are done! They aren't as big as I would like my muffins, but I ended up getting about two dozen or so of them, so the numbers make up for it.

As for the taste, I was fortunate enough to have guests over that day so I got two additional opinions in with those of Fluxxdog and Veonoss. Apparently, the muffins were good enough that they asked if they could take some home with them! I was pleased with this reaction, but I know I can make them taste better. Next time I go for this recipe, I'm going to add some of the apple spice seasoning mix into the batter and not just the apples.