With apologies to my gluten intolerant and paleo friends, I’m currently between paying gigs, it’s Autumn, and therefore I’m baking a lot. This topic is liable to crop up more than once in the coming weeks.
Today, the ravenous hordes kids will be home for the afternoon with a couple friends to play D & D, and (partly in an effort to get them to eat something besides every cracker or corn chip in the house) I’m making muffins. Just muffins. Nothing fancy.
Just Muffins go something like this*:
- 8 oz (1 and a half generous cups) some blend of whole grain flours, maybe with 1/4 rolled oats (4 parts)
- 2 oz (1 generous quarter cup) sugar or some similar sweetener (1 part)
- 8 oz (1 cup) milk or some similar liquid (4 parts)
- 2 eggs (2 parts)
- 2 oz (4T, half a stick) melted butter or oil (1 part)
- scant 1.5 tsp baking powder (1 tsp per 5 oz flour)
- .75 tsp salt (.5 tsp per 5 oz flour)
- fruit, nuts, etc.
- spices
Mix wet ingredients and dry ingredients separately, adding additions such as fruit and nuts to the dry, then fold together until just blended. Bake at 350ºF for ~20 minutes. 8 oz flour yields a dozen or so regular size muffins.
Within the basic ratios and keeping the baking powder standard, I tend to vary these muffins quite a bit. Today version has spelt flour, buttermilk and milk for the liquid (because I had a tiny bit of buttermilk hanging around), a chopped apple, some cranberries, some apple pie spice. I sprinkled the tops with more apple pie spice mixed with sugar before baking. (Sprinkling the tops with something + sugar is a super easy way to make Just Muffins a little bit more like treats without adding much more sugar. NB: This also works with scones.) They smell delicious.
I have this formula memorized, which means I can often produce muffins as a handy houseguest trick, as well as a quick way to sate the hordes kids. (To take the muffins savory instead of sweet, just dial back the sweetener.) Baking warms the house on a chilly afternoon and muffins go great with tea, which goes great with Autumn.
*Adapted from Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio, which is often how I roll when baking.
there is no perfect 
I’ll have to try these… my favorite muffin recipe uses a trick I haven’t seen elsewhere, which acts like creaming together butter and sugar but is much less annoying.
Melt 10Tb butter, and beat well with 2 eggs. Add that to the dry ingredients (3c flour, 3/4c sugar, 1/2t salt and 1/2t baking soda and 1t baking powder) and you can mix that without much worry of it getting overbeaten. Then add 1 1/2c yogurt, until it’s just barely mixed, and the texture comes out perfect every time. I used to always overbeat my muffins, and this avoids it entirely.
LikeLike