TWD Rewind: Orange Berry Muffins

I was very excited to see that Laurie, the creator and leader of Tuesdays with Dorie gave us a rewind week for Thanksgiving! I had wanted to make the Fluted Ricotta and Polenta Cake but unfortunately I couldn't get to the store it time so I decided on Orange Berry Muffins which was the 4th recipe chosen by the Tuesdays with Dorie bakers. The recipe calls for blueberries but I have a giant bag of cranberries in my fridge so I subbed them. The muffins had a good light consistency but I can't say that I was very impressed with the orange flavor. This might have to do with the orange I used- I'll probably try these again with a nicer, more fragrant orange and maybe double the zest. I'm probably going to end up rewinding quite a few other recipes from Baking From My Home to Yours for Thanksgiving Day- my only problem is narrowing it down to two or three favorites!

TWD: Coffee Break Muffins

I've gotten to the point where I always have just enough energy at the end of the day to cook dinner for my family, feed them, clean the girls up after dinner, entertain them for a few hours after dinner, and get them into bed...but that's it. The bedtime routine stretches from Eloise whose teeth I start brushing at 8:00 and who gets in her crib around 8:30 to Helen who I start reading bedtime stories to at 8:30 and finally (if I'm lucky) get into bed around 9:30. Lately, Helen has been getting out of bed approximately five times before actually falling asleep (don't even ask me about our hour long knock down drag out fight everyday for nap time...which they never ever take at the same time). So guess what, every night I try to drag myself back into the kitchen to wash dishes, scrub pots, sweep, clean the highchair, etc. but that has not happened since this pregnancy started! So then the next morning (is 4:50am considered morning?) I have a horribly dirty kitchen staring me in the face- a kitchen that I must clean prior to starting breakfast and packing Derrick's lunch. So let me tell you about these Coffee Break Muffins. Let me just say they will be a staple for this house for the remainder of this pregnancy!!

First of all, they are extremely simple to throw together. The butter is melted, so no having to remember to put it out to soften on the counter. There is no citrus zesting. No sifting of flour. No chopping of chocolate. No toasting of nuts. You get the picture! If you are plagued with a dish washing epidemic like I am, you can even just use one bowl and dump the liquid ingredients directly into the dry! Oh and although Dorie calls for baking the muffins for 20 minutes, mine were ready in about 13. Now, most importantly, the muffins contain both a strong cup of coffee and a tablespoon of espresso powder so these muffins are actually caffeinated- music to my sleep deprived ears! When you're pregnant you aren't supposed drink much caffeine, most doctors say one cup of coffee a day is the limit, and I have been pretty dedicated to not really drinking more than 1/4 a diet coke every few days so these muffins were like gold! The whole family loved them! Thank you Rhiani of Chocoholic Anonymous for this week's Tuesdays with Dorie!

TWD: Oatmeal Breakfast Bread

Now that school is back in session I've been making a lot of muffins, breads, biscuits, etc. lately for breakfast. I've been trying to stock my freezer full of things that Derrick can grab on the way out the door, eat on the way in to school, or eat during his planning period...but, my plan is not working. You see, Derrick is about the size of a beanpole with the appetite of an elephant so every time I pull a batch of 12 muffins or 8 biscuits out the oven imagining that we'll have enough for today and the rest of the week they mysteriously disappear before they are cool enough to wrap up and freeze! Of course, the kids aren't really helping out with my plan either...and let's face it, now that I'm in the 2nd trimester and still nursing Eloise, I'm pretty hungry too, so I guess I can't blame it all on the husband!

Anyway, this bread fit nicely into my breakfast baking bonanza. It was soft, incredibly moist, flavorful, and not too unhealthy so it was pretty much finished off before I could really get a good picture of it! Some of the fat is replaced by unsweetened applesauce and I ended up subbing half the white flour for whole wheat flour and fat free plain yogurt for buttermilk just to up the health factor. Dorie says you can use any type of dried fruit but all I had on hand were big, plump raisins so mine wasn't too exciting- I'd love to try cherries or apricots.

I actually ended up making these again as muffins but I did about forty-million substitutions- peach puree for applesauce, prunes for raisins, and a bunch of different spices and they still turned out really delicious! The only problem I found with the muffins was that they were so soft that some of them stuck to the pan- not that that stopped them from being eaten in one day... Seriously, I don't know how to fill the man up!

Thanks Natalie of Oven Love for choosing this versatile and delicious recipe for this week's Tuesdays with Dorie pick!

TWD: Allspice Crumb Muffin(mess)

Ok, you'll have to take my word on these muffins because my lovely and talented daughter, Miss Helen Mae, dropped and broke my camera earlier this week. Just one of the many delights I'm facing now that she can reach up and pull things off of the kitchen counter! I'm trying to decide if it is worth trying to fix it or if the time has come to get a new (and better) camera! I'd love to hear recommendations for an easy to use and not very expensive camera!

Anyway, this week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe was chosen by Kayte of Grandma's Kitchen Table (you can find the recipe on her blog- and her muffins look gorgeous). I'm sorry to say that these muffins were a total disaster for me! I'm actually pretty surprised at how poorly they turned out because I've made most of the muffins in Baking From My Home to Yours and I've only had success with Dorie's muffins.

Apparently I was not the only one who had problems with these. It seems that many of the TWD bakers put these in the oven only to find that the lovely crumbly streusel topping had melted off the top and onto the muffin pan. My streusel also sank to the bottom of the batter creating a strange little swirl of allspice and brown sugar inside the muffin. In fact, I could not pry even one intact muffin out of the tin! I can't really call these a complete disaster though, because the flavor and even the texture was delicious!! Allspice is such a wonderful, complex spice that I really don't use often enough! These were so tasty that Derrick, Helen Mae, and I ate all twelve of them (straight out of the pan) over the course of one day! I don't think that's ever happened before! So, I'm tempted to try them again, maybe with a little less butter in the crumb topping?

TWD: Pumpkin Muffins

Ok so I sort of fell behind this week with Tuesdays with Dorie. This week Kelly from Sounding My Barbaric Gulp! picked some lovely pumpkin muffins for us to bake. I went shopping for the ingredients last night- but because I was house-sitting in a different neighborhood I couldn't find everything I needed at the grocery store- namely pumpkin. Dorie's recipe calls for unsweetened pumpkin puree- well I thought that would be easy enough to find because it's almost Thanksgiving and everyone is making pumpkin pies, pumpkin bread, pumpkin soup, etc. Well, this is all I could find:


It's organic, which is nice, but it already had cane syrup, cloves, cinnamon, and about five other spices in it. I was brave and I used it anyway. I omitted the brown sugar and reduced the amount of white sugar and completely did without the spices that Dorie calls for- so it was sort of like her recipe. Oh yeah, and did I mention that the store only carried low-fat buttermilk?


So I mixed it all up last night, realized I was really late for something, stuck it in the fridge, and pulled it out this morning. Let's just say the consistency was very different this morning-much, much thicker- which I had of course anticipated. So I baked them up anyway- what did I have to lose? Well, they turned out pretty good- if I hadn't known about all of my little snafus- I would probably have loved them- but you know how it is when you wonder if they would have been even better if everything had been just right? These have a great dense and moist texture- and I actually loved the addition of the raisins and the sunflower seeds. I will definitely make these again... and I will use all the proper ingredients and mix them and immediately bake them!

Muffin Monday: Blueberry Cinnamon Buns

My grandmother is almost like a storybook character (seriously the way I'm about to describe her will make you think that I'm just trying to be cool by inventing myself such a rockin' grandma). First of all, she does all of the great regular grandmother stuff like cook delicious meals, do fun crafts, bake wonderful Christmas cookies, and take you on exciting outings to the park- but with Tweetie (yes that's what I call my grandmother) the fun doesn't stop there- she also taught us how to meditate with the Buddhist monks (imagine listening to a tape in the car on the way to school of OOOHHHHHHHHHHMMMMM), she recites poetry off the top of her head, she marches in peace rallies, she sees far more movies in theaters than I do, she's a vegetarian, she gives historical tours of the French Quarter, she volunteers at the library and the hospital, and, at 72, she goes to a jazzercise class every morning.

That's a brief glimpse of Tweetie- so what has she to do with muffins? you might ask. Well along with being a vegetarian- Tweetie is always looking for little health tricks: a handful of almonds will give you your daily requirement of Vitamin E, soy wards of breast cancer, and one of her favorites- blueberries help with memory. Now Tweetie (who the other day was disappointed that she could only spout off about 9 of Eugene O'Neill's most famous plays-umm I was an English major and I only knew The Iceman Cometh) needs no help with her memory. However, she is convinced that the blueberries will help preserve her veritable pantheon of knowledge, and she is also dedicated to making sure that none of us fall privy to memory loss. As a result, my mom had about ten pounds of frozen organic blueberries in her freezer and with it still being hurricane season down here in New Orleans, we decided that we had to get baking (for you lucky folks who don't have hurricanes- you DO NOT want to have a freezer full of food when the electricity goes out for 3 days in 97 degree weather)!

So my mom suggested we make some good old fashioned blueberry muffins- and we have a really good blueberry muffin recipe- but- I, of course, found a different recipe in my old standard, Cookies, irresistible biscuits, brownies, and bars by Hilaire Walden (P.S. this is the last recipe I'm going to post from this book because I really think you should purchase a copy for yourself!) The recipe is called Fruit and Cinnamon Buns- they end up looking pretty similar to muffins- but they don't get that big muffin dome on the top. The crumb of these muffins is not as good as our old standby blueberry muffin but the cinnamon flavor is wonderful with the blueberries and it is hands down the easiest muffin I've ever made. You've heard of dump cakes where you just throw everything together and mix it up- well this is the dump muffin.

Fruit and Cinnamon Buns

1 cup all purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
pinch of salt
scant 1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 egg
3/4 cup milk
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 cup fresh or thawed frozen blueberries, or black currants

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Grease eight muffin pans (I highly suggest using paper muffin liners because the blueberries tend to stick to the pan). With an electric mixer, beat together the first eight ingredients until smooth.


Fold the blueberries or black currants into the other ingredients until just evenly combined. Spoon the mixture into the muffin pans, filling them two-thirds full (we topped them with raw cane sugar- which gave the top a great little crunch). Bake for about 25 minutes, until a skewer or cake tester inserted in the center of a bun comes out clean. Allow to cool in the muffin pans, on a wire rack, for 10 minutes, then transfer the buns to the wire rack and allow to cool completely.

Apple and Date Wondermuffins

Today is my little sister's 17th birthday- so Happy Birthday Madeline! She was hoping for a car but instead she got these glorious apple and date muffins! I think I really one up-ed her expectations- and you will think so too when try these out. Seriously, I did not know how high to set my expectations for these muffins because they call for whole wheat flour and only 2 tablespoons of butter... and well... that sounded sort like a healthy muffin. But have no fear! These muffins are really really wonderful.

I found them in a giant cookbook called, Cookies, irresistible biscuits, brownies, and bars by Hilaire Walden. Now this book has yet to give me a bad recipe (honestly- everyone should go out and buy it) , in fact, it holds my all-time favorite snickerdoodle recipe, my mom's go-to decadent fudge brownie recipe, and a really fancy white chocolate macadamia nut chocolate chip torte (that is a perfect party pleaser). SO... I felt pretty confident that even this seemingly health conscious muffin would be somewhere between OK and good. Well, it blew me away. The cinnamon and apple really shine through and make it a good Autumn morning breakfast treat. It is sweet without being the least bit "sugary" and it is dense without being at all "buttery"- and it was easy to make too!

So without further ado- here is the recipe with a few changes I made in parentheses:

Date and Apple (Wonder)Muffins

1 1/4 cups self-rising whole wheat flour (I couldn't find self-rising whole wheat so I added 1 1/4 tsp baking powder and 1/8 tsp salt to regular whole wheat flour)
1 1/4 cups self-rising white flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (I used a very generous teaspoon)
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons margarine (I used butter)
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1 eating apple ( I used a large, firm Golden Delicious apple and it worked beautifully)
1 cup apple juice
2 tablespoons pear and apple spread (I actually used an organic morello cherry fruit spread)
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/2 cup chopped dates
1 tablespoon chopped pecans (I used slivered almonds on half and left the other half plain)

Preheat the oven to 400F. Arrange 12 paper liners in a deep muffin pan (I found that because my muffin pan is not very deep, I got about four extra muffins out of the batch). Put the whole wheat flour in a mixing bowl. Sift in the white flour with the cinnamon and baking powder. Rub in the margarine until the mixture resembles bread crumbs, then stir in the brown sugar (I used my hand pastry blender to mix in the butter, just because its not as messy, and I love my pastry blender).

Quarter and core the apple, chop the flesh finely and set aside (now the recipe did not specify as to whether you are supposed to peel the apple- I did because thought the skin my get a bit chewy or rough). Stir a little of the apple juice with the fruit spread until smooth. Mix in the remaining juice, then add to the rubbed-in mixture with the beaten egg. Add the chopped apple to the bowl with the dates. Mix quickly until just combined.


Divide the mixture among the muffin liners. Sprinkle the chopped pecans. Bake the muffins for 20-25 minutes (20 minutes did it for mine), until-golden brown and firm in the middle. Transfer to a wire rack and serve while still warm (they are really good warm and room temp. too).


And Helen Mae loved them too! Just kidding, I'm not a psycho mom- she's still sticking to the baby food

I have a huge tub full of chopped dates from Sam's Club, so expect to see more date recipes in the near future...

Is it a doughnut? Is it a muffin? NO... it's a Doughnut Muffin!

When I was thinking about clever and witty food related names for my blog I suddenly remembered an odd little song that my younger brother, Jordan, and I had written in honor of our new baby sister, Madeline. The lyrics were simple and, well, meaningless- but it went like this:

She's a sandmuffin plump of a grape
dootdoot do
She's a sandmuffin plup of a grape
dootdoot do
She's a sand sand sand sand sand sandmuffin!
A sandmuffin plump of a grape
dootdoot do

Give us a break we were six and four.

Anyway, when I named my blog Sandmuffin it made me think about these delicious Doughnut Muffins that I found a few years ago. They don't taste like sand (in fact they are quite moist), but the pretty little dusting of cinnamon sugar on the top makes them appear to be sandy. Because I have a darling seven month old daughter there is pretty much no way on earth that I'll be able to make real doughnuts any time in the next 2-3 years- but these are a pretty fabulous quick substitute. Unlike most muffin recipes which call for making a "well" in the dry ingredients and then pouring the wet ingredients into it and then lightly folding them together, this easy recipe has you mix it more like cake-alternating milk and four with the butter and sugar. I'm no pastry chef, but I'm pretty sure that's why these little babies capture that cake doughnutty consistency.

The recipe came from a great little cookbook called Brunch, The Perfect Weekend Treat, by Jennifer Donovan- I really recommend it especially if you are like me and get excited by pretty color pictures of food!

Doughnut Muffins

6oz butter, softened, plus extra for greasing
1 cup superfine sugar
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
generous 2 1/2 cups ap flour
3/4 tbsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
generous 1 cup milk

Topping
1/2 cup superfine sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tbsp butter, melted

Makes 12 muffins

Preheat oven to 350 F/ 180 C. Grease a deep 12-cup muffin pan (I used cupcake papers). In a large bowl, beat the butter and sugar together until light and creamy. Add the eggs, a little at a time, beating well between additions. Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and nutmeg (I used ground nutmeg, but I'm sure fresh would be even more delicious!) together. Add half to the creamed mixture with half the milk. Gently fold the ingredients together before incorporating the remaining flour and milk. Spoon the mixture into the prepared muffin pan, filling each hold to about two-thirds full. Bake for 15-20 minutes (mine had to go all the way to about 22 min), or until the muffins are lightly brown and firm to the touch. For the topping, mix the sugar and cinnamon together. While the muffins are still warm from the oven, brush lightly with melted butter, and sprinkle over the cinnamon and sugar mixture. Eat warm or cold (they really are good both ways).