I like Molasses!

But these aren't my favorite brans. See "muffin in the rough," ça c'est très bien. Cette recette a été au dessous de mes attentes.



Cependant, c'est bon.

I got it from this book from the seventies (like everything else in my parent's kitchen) called Laurel's Kitchen.

Her recipe is for apple bran muffins, but we didn't have apples, so I used strawberries and blueberries instead.

She recommends eating these muffins with cheddar.
I say no.


Recipe: Bran Muffins
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cups wheat bran
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1 TBS grated orange rind
1 cup apple ( I subbed blueberries and strawberries)
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup chopped nuts/seeds ( I left out.)
juice of one orange
scant 2 cups clabbered milk!
1 egg
1/2 cup molasses
2 TBS oil

1. Preheat to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Mix flour, bran, salt, soda, and nutmeg together. Stir in rind, fruit, and nuts if using.
2. Pour juice of orange into a 2 cup measure, fill the rest up with the clabbered milk. Add to egg, molasses, and oil and stir it all together a lot.
3. Combine, but not too much.
Bake for 25 minutes.
Should make about 2 dozen small muffins

This is what I do.

-Amanda

Double the Surface Area

We never blogged these. I don't know why. They were good. Our clabbering was superb, even though Anna said they smelled like apple cider vinegar even after they were baked. My favorite part was the chocolate topping. Usually I just ate the top and threw out the bottom, since the bread part went stale after the day we made them.



So my genius idea was to use the remainders that I hadn't consumed the chocolate topping off of to make conchita bread pudding, conchita chocolate orange bread pudding to be specific.

Mmm, we used this recipe to make the conchitas and I pretty much winged it with the bread pudding. I used an 8 x 8 pan, maybe 10 or so of the conchitas, 2 eggs, some sweetened cocoa powder, some orange zest, a quarter cup melted margarine, 2 cups skim milk, and some raw sugar sprinkled on top.

Bread puddings are pretty flexible, so you never really need a recipe, just stale yeast bread, eggs, and some sort of milk/cream/etc.

The pudding pictures are ugly, so if you make it close your eyes as you eat it.
Rhyme?

Also these are sweet, so here you go.
-Amanda

The Muffin Cup Conundrum

Wrapper versus naked? Naked is difficult to remove, but paper means a lot of the muffin outer layer is left clinging... I think in the end the extra effort is worth it to get the whole muffin.



These are my third batch in my search for the perfect bran muffin. More bran-y than the last. These call for wheat bran--of which I bought a HUGE bag. They're not as sturdy as the first though. But I I got the right portion of fruit finally!

I adapted the recipe from here, except I
a) Zested a huge orange and put that all in: reminds me of fruit cake for some reason.
b) Used a sprinkling of pumpkin pie spice instead of the recommended pinches of cardamom, all spice, and cinnamon.
c)Uped the apple sauce to 1/2 a cup instead of 1/4.
d)Used splenda instead of regular sugar.
e) Added a banana that was going bad.
f) Added maybe 3/4-1 cup of fresh blueberries.
g) Used only maybe 2 teaspoons of oil.
h) Used skim clabbered milk, instead of low-fat buttermilk.
i) Used almond extract instead of vanilla.

I would say more almond extract and maybe to make it sturdier add flax seed?

And I think this is a good song for them in the morning, it especially complements the tartness of the cranberries.
Anna made a few of these in her pixie muffin pan, yummy. They bled and it was beautiful.



Countdown to True Blood?

-Amanda

Clabber Up that Baklava

These were very simple. The honey is messy. I'm not a walnut person but maybe you are.



Care of Nigella:

Filling:
1/2 c. chopped walnuts (Pistachios would be better.)
3 TBL melted butter/margarine
1/3 c. sugar
1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon

Cake:
1 1/4 scant c. flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 c. sugar
1 big egg
3 TBL melted butter/margarine
1 + 2 TBL CLABBERED milk = 1 c. skim milk + 2 TBL lemon juice or vinegar (I used both!) --mix together and wait 5 minutes

Honey to drizzle

1. Mix all of the filling ingredients together. Set aside.
2. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Mix the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and sugar all together. Then mix the clabbered milk, the egg, and the butter together.
3. Mix the dry and wet together very carefully. Put muffins cups in a 12 muffin tin. Fill them with the batter 1/3 of the way up. Add a scant tablespoon of the filling to each. Then fill each cup 2/3 of the way full with remaining batter. Scatter leftover walnut topping on the tops.
4. Bake for about 15 minutes. Take them out of the tin-carefully! And put them on a rack to cool and be drizzled. I recommend putting a piece of wax paper underneath the rack to avoid messes. Then drizzle honey on each muffin--it's messy but it gets absorbed.




Maybe you want to listen to this song while you eat them.

I like bran muffins better.

-Amanda

Date Day

Dates used to scare me. In second grade, my primary relationship was them was the fact that you could say the sentence, "On that date I ate a date while I was on a date," and feel really cool. Now they're just delicious. Sometimes they're desecrated though when they're a date nut bread and the nut in question is pecan or walnut. Sometimes you're lucky though, and that nut is almond, or in this case, pistachio. I found this recipe, for scones, which I always thought were so refined. And these are supposed to be healthier scones (though next time I would add a tad more sugar and definitely the orange zest which I skipped out on in this batch). I kept the basic structure of this, but played around with a few things like poppy over fennel seeds, almond extract over vanilla, and clabbering the milk over ready-buttermilk. This would also be wonderful with fig instead of dates, and almonds instead of pistachios, and maybe with ginger or cardamom...so many possibilities.



Date, Pistachio, Poppy Scones
1 3/4 c.flour (I'd say a tad less next time)
2 TBS sugar (increase this, maybe 1/4 c.)
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
6 TBS butter, chilled (I used that vegan stuff Earth something, I forget.)
1/4 c. non-fat cottage cheese
1/4 c. low-fat milk plus a teaspoon of lemon juice to clabber it, takes 5 minutes (I needed to add more milk as I made the batter, so I'd increase this to 1/3 c. or maybe even 1/2 c.)
1 tsp orange zest (I didn't use this, but I would highly recommend, or lemon juice would be fine too, or blood orange, mmm)
1/2 tsp almond extract
1 c. chopped dates
1/4 c. chopped pistachios
1 TBS poppy seeds

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. In a small bowl, clabber the milk with the lemon juice, then add the cottage cheese, and almond extract and whisk.
3. In another bowl mix the flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Then cut the butter into small pieces and mix it in to the dry ingredients by rubbing it all together with your fingers (because a) I don't have a food processor and b) pastry cutters are useless).
4)Mix in the zest, dates, pistachios, and poppy seeds with the dry ingredients. Combine the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients but don't overmix! No one loves tough scones.
5)Throw out some flour on a cutting board or any surface really and take handfuls of the dough and shape into biscuit shapes, turnover shapes, whatever suits you really. I made mine about 1/2 inch thick and biscuit looking.
6) You can put an egg-wash on at this point, which in retrospect would have looked pretty, but I was too lazy. Just crack open an egg, beat it a bit, and spread it over the top of the scones with a pastry brush or your fingers.
7). Spray a baking sheet and put scones out. (I got about 11 out of this.)
8) Bake for about 15 minutes, more or less.

-Amanda

Where's Walnut

Today I discovered the only thing better than ditching your first ochem lab lecture because you found out the bio lab that was supposed to follow was not happening. The nostril-warming aroma of freshly baked banana walnut muffin. Illuminated by a particularly resplendent flash of lightning.

What you'll need:

1 egg
1 big banana
1/2c olive oil
1c all purpose flour
1/2c brown sugar
1/2c buttermilk (I didn't have any, so I used fat free milk clabbered with some apple cider vinegar)
1/3c walnut pieces
1/2tsp vanilla extract
1/2tsp salt
1/2tsp baking powder
1/4tsp baking soda


Preheat the oven to 400F. Line your muffin tin with muffin liners.

Beat together the oil and sugar, followed by the egg. Then the banana. This part was fun. I threw in chunks and watched the mixer devour them.

Combine flour, salt, and baking powder+soda. Alternate adding this and the buttermilk to the mixer bowl. I probably overmixed the dough, but I liked the fine texture of the muffins.

Stir in walnuts and vanilla.

Fill your muffin tin (I had more dough than could fit into 6 muffin holes, so I used one of my nice large goodwill cupcake container-shaped ramekins to make an oversized muffin.

These are supposed to bake for 20 minutes, but it took me a while longer. It should be nice and golden brown on top. But, as always, poke that guy with a toothpick and make sure that upon extracting your little wooden helper, he leaves your toothpick-touching finger nice and dry. I'm not sure how well I avoided being confusing right there in that sentence. Umm. That's alright.

Oh and, I don't like things that are too sweet, so this was not very sweet at all. Worked well for me. Actually a bit more sugar wouldn't have hurt. Maybe like an 1/8c of granulated. Goodbye.

-Anna




based on this recipe, halved.