Thursday, September 30, 2010

Half-Wheat Blueberry Muffins

Yes, I'm back. Sorry, it's been a week. I have been baking, but can you say catastrophic failure? Because I certainly can. I'm working on the fix and hopefully we'll have a working recipe within the next few days.

In the mean time, I have a different recipe. A healthy (ish) recipe! As you can see, this is called "Half-Wheat". It's a play on Whole Wheat since half the flour in this recipe happens to be Whole Wheat! It's fun, it's exciting and it's not too bad overall for your health!

Ingredients:
3 Tablespoons butter, melted and cooled
1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour (if you don't want to use whole wheat flour or don't have it on hand, you can use 2 cups all purpose instead)
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 egg
3 6oz containers blueberry yogurt
1/2 cup milk
1 cup fresh or frozen (not thawed!) blueberries
Cooking Spray

Tools:
Muffin pan
Large bowl
Small bowl
Spoon

Turn the oven to 375 degrees. While that starts, melt the butter in the small bowl and spray the muffin tin (or use paper cups if you prefer)

Once you have those two going, in the large bowl mix all the dry ingredients, like this:


It will look a little bit darker than your regular muffin mix. This is the whole wheat flour, don't worry about it!
The butter should have melted and had a chance to cool by now. Take it out of the microwave and add the egg. Beat well. Next, add the yogurt and the milk and mix well. This picture shows the egg, butter and yogurt (I added the milk later due to thickness issues, but you should add it now instead)


Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix well using the wooden spoon. Mix carefully, so it looks like this:


It should be pretty thick, another feature of whole wheat flour. Whole wheat flour is denser than all purpose flour because it is not ground down quite as fine. Add the blueberries and fold them in gently.

Add the mix to the muffin tin and bake for 20 minutes. They will come out looking a bit darker than normal blueberry muffins, but you should be able to stick a toothpick in the middle (or a knife) and come out clean.

Allow them to cool and serve.

Oh, another new feature! A reader emailed me and asked about printing the recipes. It turns out that when you hit "Print", most of the recipes are coming out 5 or more pages long! This is bad and I'm working on fixing this. You may notice a "Print Now" button at the bottom. DON'T PUSH IT! It still prints out 4 or 5 pages long. Instead, I'm going to do a "cliff notes" version at the bottom of every recipe. Simply copy this and paste it to a word processing program and print it from there. Much shorter that way!

Ingredients:

1 cup all purpose flour                                      1 cup whole wheat flour
1/3 cup sugar                                                   1/4 tsp salt
3 tsp baking powder                                        1 tsp cinnamon
3 Tbsp butter, melted                                       1 egg
3 6oz container blueberry yogurt                       1/2 cup milk
1 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen (not thawed)

1. Preheat the oven to 375. Melt the butter and spray the muffin pan/line with papers
2. Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl
3. Mix the butter and egg in a small bowl
4. Add the yogurt and milk to the small bowl and mix
5. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix with a wooden spatula
6. Add the blueberries and fold them into the batter
7. Pour the batter into the muffin pan and bake for 20 minutes.

2 comments:

  1. If you want muffins which have whole wheat in them, but have a lighter texture and more tender crumb, you can also use white whole wheat flour or whole wheat pastry flour. It's great when you're baking for pickier people but still want to sneak in the health benefits ;)

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  2. Oh, also- the secret to great muffins or anything with baking soda as a leavening in it is to mix the ingredients together until they are JUST incorporated. Overmixing will develop the proteins in the flour, which is good for chewy bread but bad for tender muffins.

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