Good Eats: Muffins

I am a creature of habit. I crave order and routine in most aspects of my life including cooking. It is not very easy for me to try out new things. Thanks to blogging and blog-hopping, this has slowly been changing over the last couple of months, at least where cooking is concerned.

Every time I make a batch of muffins, it is usually always the banana-walnut kind, mainly because I tend to have all required ingredients, especially the bananas- in various stages of the decaying process- on hand. More importantly, it is something that has been tried and tested in my kitchen numerous times.

In keeping with my resolve to eat healthy, a big canister of oats was purchased recently. I am not too fond of the oats and milk combination mainly because of the gooey, slimy texture of the resultant mass. I decided to try using oats for making muffins. Inspired by this, this and this, I made two different kinds of muffins-
*Oats and Orange-Coconut muffins
*Oats and Cranberry-Pomegranate muffins

This is how I went about doing it.

Ingredients:
Dry:
1 ½ C -All purpose flour
½ cup oats (ground to a fine powder)
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
A pinch of salt

Wet:
1/3 cup oil
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
¼ cup milk

Mix the dry and wet ingredients together and divide into 2 batches.

Batch 1- Oats and Orange-Coconut muffins (makes 6 medium muffins)
Add:
½ cup orange juice
2 tsp orange extract
A handful of toasted walnuts
2 Tbsp sweetened coconut flakes (added in the batter and sprinkled on top)

Batch 2- Oats and Cranberry-Pomegranate muffins (makes 12 small muffins)
Add:
½ cup cranberry-pomegranate juice
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp lemon juice
Zest of 1 lemon
A handful of toasted walnuts (added in the batter and sprinkled on top)

Method:
Preheat the oven to 350 degree F and line the muffin cups with paper liners.

Fill muffin cups; sprinkle with topping.

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until light golden brown.

Serve warm.

Notes:
Muffins can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for a day or so; needs to be frozen for longer storage.

I like how the first batch of muffins turned out. They tasted really good, had a hint of orange-coconut flavor and were not too sweet.

The second batch of muffins had no taste in particular and I don't know if I would make this again without making a few changes to the ingredient list. The pomegranate-cranberry juice didn’t detract from the taste, but it didn’t add anything either.


It’s raining awards in the food blog world!

Helene, Vaishali, Namratha, Laavanya, Priya and Deepa have passed this on to me.

Namratha and Saswati give me this one.



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Thank you girls, for thinking of me and for your sweet and encouraging words!