As discussed in an earlier post, Cooper is in love with muffins. He recently had a birthday, so I decided that some fresh-baked muffins for breakfast were just what he needed to start off his special day. I’d been planning on making banana muffins, but any time I thought about doing it, either the bananas were way too fresh, or way too black and horrifying.
Luckily, we had gone to a pick-your-own apple orchard a few days prior, so we had an entire sack of apples that were just begging to be eaten. Last year’s excursion ended with a sack of apples that just sat in our fridge for months, waiting for an apple pie that we never got around to making — so I vowed that this year would be different.
I googled “healthy apple muffins,” came up with this list of different recipes. There were several that had ingredients that I had zero interest in, including one with ricotta cheese. I settled on the apple-cranberry muffins because I had a couple bags of Craisins left in the pantry, and I’ve been wanting to try out a muffin recipe that involved oatmeal.
I did, however, make a few changes to the recipe. The biggest one was replacing white sugar with brown sugar. This was a good move, because once I mixed the wet ingredients together, it almost had a caramel apple consistency, which was delightful. As I was mixing everything together, I started to get giddy because, hello fall!
My big mistake was not thinking about the fact that I was making mini-muffins instead of full-sized and adjusting my cook time accordingly. Instead of 20-25 minutes, 15-20 is plenty if you’re going the mini-muffin route (incidentally, Mini-Muffin Route is the name of my Little Feat tribute band). I kept mine in for 20 minutes, and they did get a little bit overdone. Cooper though? Did not care even a little bit.
Clacked by Kona Gallagher 
on Oct 05, 2010 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
