Chocolate Malted Muffins

Blogging Marathon# 57: Week 4/ Day 3

Theme: Kid's Delight -- Cooking with Whole grains

Dish: Chocolate Malted Muffins

For the 3rd and final day of this week's blogging marathon, I made these delicious Chocolate Malted Muffins. These go to Kalyani's 'Kid Delight -- Cooking with Whole grains' event (an event started by Valli).

I usually substitute some of the all purpose flour with wholewheat flour and wholewheat pastry flour to add some whole grains and fiber to my bakes. I have also used barley flour in a strawberry cake but this recipe uses 1 cup barley flour and is the main ingredient for this muffin.

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Banana Nutella Swirl Muffins (Eggless recipe)

Blogging Marathon# 55: Week 2/ Day 1

Theme: Nutella Galore

Dish: Banana Nutella Muffin

We are starting a brand new week of blogging marathon today and my theme for this week is 'Recipes made with Nutella or Chocolate Hazelnut spread'. I knew right away that my kids would love whatever I make for this week since they absolutely LOVE Nutella.

For the first day, I made a moist & delicious banana muffins with nutella swirls. I can't stop myself from bananas even though I know very well that by day 4, they will start to smell very 'banana-ey' and no body in the house would really want to eat them. I try and find some interesting ways to use the overripe bananas and these muffins with Nutella swirls sounded just perfect.

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Coconut Flour Chocolate Muffins (Eggless, vegan, gluten free recipe)

I love picking up new ingredients when I go grocery shopping. Sometimes I know exactly what I want to do with them and sometimes I'm totally clueless but still buy it, hoping to figure things out later. One of the most latest of my impulse buys is Coconut flour.

Coconut flour is made of ground up, dried coconut meat and is completely gluten-free. It has more fiber than any other flour, making it especially filling and a great choice for those trying to lose weight. It is a protein powerhouse with 14gms of protein per 100gms of flour.

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Pizza Muffins

The title of the post itself is very catchy, especially to kids and adults who love pizza. That is what drew me to making these cheesy and delicious pizza muffins for this month's 'Home Baker's Challenge'. I've missed couple of challenges due to many reasons, but when I saw Priya's savory bakes and these pizza muffins, I had to bake them.

Both my kids love pizza, so this was an obvious choice for me. These muffins have all the flavors of a pizza -- basil, cheese and pizza sauce. You can add any vegetable that you like on your pizza to the batter to make the muffins taste just like your favorite pizza. My super picky son likes onions, tomatoes and corn (he recently added spinach to that list), so added some corn to the batter. I think the next time, I'm going to add some caramelized onions to give some more flavor to the muffins.

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Almond Butter-Chocolate Chip Muffins

Blogging Marathon# 45: Week 3/ Day 3
Theme: Kid's Delight -- Nuts & Legumes for Kid's Lunchbox
Dish: Almond Chocolate Chip Muffins

For the 3rd and final day of this week's BM, I made Almond butter-Chocolate chip muffins. I saw the recipe for hazelnut butter-cranberry muffins lot time back in Vegetarian times magazine. I wanted to make them ever since, finally got a chance to make these for this week. 

I always have almond butter in the fridge and use it quite often to spread on my morning toast and add it to Indian curries to make them creamy. So I used it instead of hazelnut butter in these muffins. Also since I was baking for the kids I added chocolate chips instead of cranberries. These muffins also use half all purpose flour and half spelt flour making them more fiber and whole-grain rich.

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Whole wheat Banana Chocolate-Chip Muffins

I made these banana chocolate chip muffins couple of months ago and they were a hit with the kids. I have bananas at home all the time and the last couple overripe ones are the most neglected ones. So I'm looking for recipes to use them up. This recipe is from King Arthur Flour's 'Whole Grain Baking' cookbook.

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Pumpkin Cake Muffins (Eggless Recipe)

I wanted to use up some of the pumpkin puree I had left after making a dessert for Thanksgiving (recipe for Individual no-bake pumpkin pie coming up soon).  I browsed through Pinterest board and found these delicious Pumpkin Cake doughnuts recipe from King Arthur Flour.

I don't have a standard size doughnut pan, so I made them into muffins instead. Also since I only had 1cup of pumpkin puree left, I adjusted the quantitiesof the ingredients accordingly. Original recipe had 3 eggs and with my downsizing the recipe I had to use 2 which I comfortably substituted with egg replacer powder. 

I found the muffins to be a little too sweet to my liking. I think the next time I make it I will reduce the sugar quantity by ¼cup. I should have smoothed the tops of the muffins before baking, they turned out a little rustic looking :-)

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Eggless Banana-Chocolate Chip Muffins

Today we begin the 3rd week of blogging marathon, BM# 23 and my theme for this week is "Egg less Chocolate Cupcakes & Muffins". With a chocoholic 5 year old at home, its almost impossible for me to not take up this theme, so now you know who is happy at home!!!

As I was thinking about this week's theme, I realized that I haven't posted many recipes that are eggless. Even the eggless bakes that I have posted usually use store bought egg replacer powder or some other ingredients that are not commonly available in an Indian household. So for the next three days, I'm going to post recipes that use ingredients that are very commonly available in any pantry, even those that don't bake much.

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Banana- Wheat Germ Muffins

For the last day of our BM# 7, I made these Banana-Wheat germ muffins from Veganomicon. These muffins come together in less than 10 minutes and are high in fiber and are delicious too. But by the time I wanted to take pictures, weather got cloudy and started to pouring rain. So had to move my set up indoors and as you can see the pictures have suffered due to lack of good light. I'll try to take some better pictures tomorrow and update the post.

Update (7/30/2011): Post updated with new pics.

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Quinoa-Almond Muffins

I have been MIA for so long that I have nothing in my drafts to post and I have no clue where to start or end. But when I saw that Vegan Mofo is going to be in November this year, I signed up right away (now.. don’t ask me what I was smoking when I did that, with no post on the blog for almost 20 days I must be crazy to sign up for something where I have to post at least once every 2 days). I thought I could get into the groove of keeping the blog active. Let’s see how I’m going to fair. There is no method to my madness, I mean I don’t have a specific plan on what to cook (like a Julie & Julia project) or what to post. But I’m thinking of to at least try to make something new AND take pictures AND post every day.

So to those of you who don’t know about Vegan Mofo, it’s a blog event where you post anything and everything about vegan food for one whole month. This is the 4th year for Vegan Mofo and this will be my 3rd time participating.

I’m going to kick off the event with these healthy Almond-Quinoa Muffins. Recipe is from Veganomicon by Isa Chandra & Terry Romero.

Ingredients:
Soy milk – 1 cup
Ground Flaxseeds – 1tbsp
Canola Oil – ¼ cup
Agave nectar (or Pure Maple Syrup) – ¼ cup
Vanilla Extract – ½ tsp
Whole wheat Pastry flour (Or All-Purpose flour) – 1¼ cups
Almond meal/ flour – ¼ cup
Cooked quinoa – 1¼ cups (I used a combo of white & red quinoa)
Baking powder – 1½ tsp
Baking Soda – ½ tsp
Cinnamon – ½ tsp
Chopped Raisins (or dried apricots or currants) – ½ cup


Method:

• Preheat oven to 350°F and lightly grease a non-stick 12 cup muffin tin.
• In a medium size bowl, whisk together soy milk and ground flaxseed. Allow to rest for 1 minute, then whisk in oil, agave nectar and vanilla.
• In a large mixing bowl, sift together flour, almond meal, baking soda, baking powder, salt and spices.
• Add the wet ingredients to dry ingredients and mix until just incorporated. Gently fold in cooked quinoa and raisins and mix until lump free.
• Pour into the prepared pan and bake for 20 to 22 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the muffin comes out clean.

Have them for breakfast or as a late afternoon snack, they are yummy and also healthy. Enjoy!!

AFAM-Orange Berry Muffins

This is my entry to this month's A Fruit A Month (AFAM) blog event being hosted by Sharmi (@ Neivedyam). These muffins are very easy to put together and they are very (berry) delicious. The orange flavor in these delicate, cakey and generously blueberried muffins is in the background.

Ingredients:
Orange - 1
Buttermilk - about 3/4 cup
Eggs - 2 large
Honey - 3 tbsp
Unsalted Butter - 1 stick, melted and cooled
Sugar - 1/3 cup
All-purpose flour - 2 cups
Baking powder - 2 1/2 tsp
Baking Soda - 1/4 tsp
Salt - 1/4 tsp
Blueberries - 1 cup fresh-preferably or frozen (not thawed)

Method:

• Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Butter or spray the 12 molds in a regular size muffin pan or fit the molds with paper muffins cups.
• Zest and juice the orange. Pour the orange juice into a large glass measuring cup or a bowl and pour in enough buttermilk to make 1 cup.
• Whisk in the eggs, honey and melted butter.
• In a large bowl, rub the sugar and orange zest together with your fingertips until the sugar is moist and the fragrance of orange strong. Whisk in the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
• Pour the liquid ingredients over the dry ingredients and gently but quickly stir to blend. The batter will be lumpy and bubbly and according to the author*, its nothing to worry about and thats just the way it should be.
• Stir in the blueberries. Divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups.
• Bake for 22 to 25 minutes. When fully baked the tops of the muffins will be golden and springy to the touch and a thin knife inserted into the center will come out clean. Transfer the pan to a rack and cool for 5 minutes before carefully removing each muffin from its mold.

* Recipe from Dorie Greenspan’s cookbook “Baking: From my Kitchen to Yours”.

These muffins are best eaten the day they are made, but they can be wrapped and poppd into the freezer; where they'll keep for up to 2 months; rewarm in a 350 degree F oven, or just split and toast them.

I refrigerated mine in a ziplock container and they lasted for almost a week.