Sunday morning, Aji asked to make cupcakes. But cupcakes are too sweet, and my kids never actually eat more than a bite of them. Muffins, on the other hand, have all the benefits of cupcakes (small size, muffin pan, liners!) without all that unnecessary sweetness that makes my kids not eat them. Saturday night I bought one of those HUGE containers of strawberries, which I had cut up after the girls went to bed and stocked in the fridge. (This is one of my recently-set goals: cut up fruits and veggies when I buy them to increase the likelihood that they will be eaten before going bad.) So, strawberry muffins were born (based on a strawberry cupcake recipe from Joy of Vegan Baking):
Ingredients
3/8 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup spelt flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup vegan sugar
~1 cup fresh strawberry puree
1/2 cup canola oil
1 T white distilled vinegar
1 tsp vanilla
What To Do
Preheat the oven to 350F.
Line the muffin pan. (The girls did this while I went out for a cup of coffee and the oven heated up)
Mix up the dry ingredients. (Jacqui's task)
Puree the strawberries in a 2 cup glass container. (immersion blender!)
Add the oil, vinegar, and vanilla to the strawberry puree and whisk to combine. (Aji's task with my help)
Make a hole in the center of the dry ingredients (Jacqui) and pour the wet into the dry (Aji).
Mix thoroughly, but not too much. (All of us!)
Spoon batter into the lined muffin pan. Note that this is a sticky dough. I used two spoons to get the batter into the pan.
I may have overfilled my individual muffin holes, but this amount of batter filled only 9 of my 12. So I added water to the other three (to keep everything moist) and put the pan into the oven.
30 minutes and a sweet smelling apartment later, we had soft, moist, strawberry-scented muffins.
Thoughts
These muffins make a great snack -- the girls had them before we went to Coney Island yesterday -- and a lovely breakfast -- this morning, fact! We are down to just two left though, so we will have to make these again.
