Summer Squash and Lemon Muffins

I make a lot of lower-fat, oil-free, whole-grain, or otherwise "healthy" muffins. Mostly, I eat them when I need a snack for before or after training, as a way to quickly get calories that I know are good for me and fall close to that 25-60-15% breakup of macronutrients that I want my overall diet to follow. Its my compromise between spending a lot of time prepping my post-workout food to eat in the car and stopping at a gas station and eating ice cream. Which is a fantastic recovery food, but maybe not for every day... Anyway, I know that muffins without oil don't freeze as well as the ones with it, and some people claim that low-fat muffins are gummy-tasting, but I've never noticed that. Particularly in my carrot-spice muffin, I find the texture to be really cake-like and moist. So I decided to do a test, with one of my favorites--the zucchini lemon muffins from the King Arthur Flour Book. (The recipe is also available online, hence the link).

I didn't have any green zucchini on hand, but I did have yellow squash, and since zucchini and squash are basically the same thing, I figured I'd use that. And I have to say, using yellow squash, you can't even tell that there is squash in the muffin when you look at it! Normally the zucchini makes things more moist anyway, without imparting any scary zucchini flavor, but now its like its hidden. Unfortunately, I told Ed that they were zucchini muffins before I thought about not telling him and seeing if he would like them, so he didn't even try one. So, after mixing the dry goods, I split them in half, and to half the batter added my "low-fat" wet goods, to the other half added the "full-fat" wet goods. In this case I replaced oil with yogurt, although I'd like to do it again trying applesauce, my other standby. Here is the recipe, in case you need things written out instead of just adjusting the King Arthur recipe:

Dry Goods:

2C flour
1C grated zucchini or yellow squash
1 tbs baking powder
1/2C sugar
1 tsp salt
1/2C walnuts
1/2C raisins (golden raisins would be perfect)
1 lemon's worth of zest (KA flour uses half a lemon, I use the whole one, because what else are you going to do with half a lemon??)

Mix together the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt. Stir in the rest of the add-ins. Divide this into two equal portions (or not, you could just put everything into one bowl and forget the experiment).

Regular Wet Stuff:
1/4C milk (I used skim)
1 egg
2.5 tbs oil

Low-Fat Wet Stuff:
1/4C milk (skim)
1 egg
2.5 tbs yogurt (or you could try applesauce)

Mix together your wet stuff (independently of each other) and dump it into the dry--fold just to combine. Fill the greased muffin tins, each batter makes 6 muffins. Bake at 400 degrees for 15-20 minutes, until the muffins are golden brown on top.

So: how did they compare? Visually, they looked the same, within the normal variation of 6 versus 6.

The lower fat muffin (is not no fat because of the walnuts and the egg) is on the left, the regular one is on the right. The lumpy things are either walnuts or raisins. No major differences. So I cut them in half. The immediate difference is the size of the crumb. The muffin made with oil has a much more consistent, small, cake-like crumb:

As an aside, you can see how the squash pretty much disappears into the muffin--all that is left are little yellow flakes, which could also be lemon zest.

The yogurt-muffin has stickier-looking insides, for lack of a better word. It is definitely not as pretty-looking, but also this particular muffin has lots of stuff in the middle, making the comparison a little trickier. But you can see that there are bigger holes in there than in the oil muffin:

If we were going on muffin looks alone, the oil one would be all I ever made. Luckily, taste comes into play. I took a bite of the oil muffin. Tastes good, moist, lemony, light, crunchy where there are walnuts and chewy on the raisins. As far as muffins go, this ranks pretty high up there. I took a bite of the yogurt-muffin. While hot from the oven, it tasted almost exactly the same as the oil-muffin. Lemony, light, moist. I finished up the muffins because you can't let things like that go to waste, and fresh-baked goods are some of my favorite things.

Once they'd cooled down, I tasted them again. The oil muffin is about the same as the first time, if a little drier-tasting. I imagine this is because of the close-knit crumb. The yogurt muffin tasted moister than before, but definitely not gummy. It was a little bit chewier, as opposed to the crumble of the oil one, but not overly much, in fact I liked the chewiness of the dough. But then again, I'm probably used to it. So how different are they? Its obvious that the oil muffin is how muffins were meant to be. The PDQ (Pretty Darn Quick) muffins from King Arthur Flour do say that if you are going to eat a muffin soon after it is baked, you can leave out the oil, and I would be inclined to agree with them. I couldn't taste a difference between the warm muffins (does that mean if I warm them up, it'll be the same? Doubtful...), but the cold yogurt muffins definitely had more bite. Of course, this could be due to the yogurt, not the fact that I left out the oil, so really I should have tried a batch that had nothing replacing the oil. Of course that might be too dry a batter... oh the options!

Conclusion: I am going to continue to make oil-starved muffins to use as training food, and save my oil-filled muffins for when the muffin isn't going to be eaten immediately and its someone other than me eating it.

While I was at it, I calculated the nutrition information for these muffins.
Regular zucchini-lemon muffin (per muffin): 227 calories, 10g fat, 30g carbs, 5g protein (39%, 52%, 9%)
Low-fat zucchini-lemon muffin (per muffin): 181 calories, 4.5g fat, 30g carbs, 5.5g protein (22%, 67%, 12%)

Blueberries Galore!

Last weekend I was racing my mountain bike, and the first field that the course went through was filled with blueberries. There was nothing for it but to go back there after I was done and fill a shopping bag with blueberries. There were so many blueberries that I could just run my hand through the leaves and the berries would fall into the bag. Pure heaven! My one complaint is that we've had so much rain that they were slightly too swollen, not a bursting with flavor as most wild blueberries most years. But who am I to complain? They were still so much better than those bloated store-bought berries!

So how to use them up? It was a dilemma. I don't normally bake with blueberries, since they're expensive, but I didn't think I could eat all of these raw before they spoiled, and since they were so water-swollen I didn't know how they would freeze. The first thing I tried was a blueberry bar recipe from the Canadian Baker's blog. These were delicious, and the crust held up surprisingly well, despite my misgivings. I changed the quantities around a bit, having only an 8x8" pan rather than a 9x13" pan, expecting to use half the recipe, but I ended up using half the recipe for the crust and topping and all the blueberries (1C of blueberries just didn't look like enough). Since I made some changes, here is my changed recipe, which is almost the same as the original.

Blueberry Crisp Bars

Crust
1/2C + 2 tbs flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 stick (1/4C) unsalted butter, softened
1/4 cup firmly packed light brown sugar

Blueberry Filling
6 tbs granulated sugar
1 tbsp cornstarch
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp lime zest, if you have it (lemon zest would also work)
2C blueberries

Crumb Topping
3/4C flour
2 tbs firmly packed brown sugar
2 tbs granulated sugar
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp salt
3 tbsp butter, melted

Preheat your oven to 350F.

To make the crust, cream the sugar with the butter, then add the flour and salt, and mix until it forms a crumbly dough. Press it into a greased 8x8" baking dish.

In a bowl, dump all the filling ingredients together and mix them to combine, then pour them over the crust. 2C of berries will make a pretty thick layer of blueberry, you could definitely get away with 1-1.5C of blueberries instead (using 1.5 tsp of corn starch for each cup of blueberries).

For the topping, mix the flour, sugars, ginger, cinnamon and salt, and then pour the melted butter of top of that and stir it around until it forms a crumbly mixture. Sprinkle the crumbles liberally over the top of the blueberries. Bake the bars at 350F for 45-50 minutes, until the blueberries are bubbly and the topping is browned. Allow the bars to cool (completely, if you have willpower of steel, which I don't) before cutting them up. I highly suggest a scoop (or two) of vanilla ice cream to go with the warm bars...

Makes 16 bars.

Blueberry-Applesauce-Bran Muffins

The blueberry crisp bars popped into (and out of) existence on Monday. Tuesday we were going over to a friend's house for dinner, so I essentially made the same recipe except that I put a pie crust on the bottom and called it a pie. Two more cups of blueberries gone. Raw blueberries were slowly disappearing, but I still needed to get rid of many more berries. Since the tea kettle was still in the car (unpacking from a 24-hour mountain bike race is a long process), I couldn't make oatmeal for breakfast, so I decided to make breakfast muffins. For a muffin to qualify as a breakfast muffin for me, it needs to be mostly whole grain crap and not be loaded with sugar or fat--at least my breakfasts have to be healthy. The problem with low-fat muffins is that the texture can be slightly gummy if you don't watch out, and they don't keep as well. But right out of the oven, a block of wood would taste delicious!

Ingredients

1C whole wheat flour
1/2C oat flour (grind up some rolled oats in the food processor for 10-20 seconds)
1/2C white flour
1/2C oat bran
1/4C sugar
1 tbs baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
A couple shakes of cinnamon
1C blueberries
3/4C milk (skim worked)
2 eggs
1C applesauce

Any leftover streusle crumble you have from the blueberry bars (optional)

Mix together the flours, oat bran, sugar, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. Stir in the blueberries. In a 2-cup measure, measure out the milk, the applesauce, and beat in the eggs. Add the wet to the dry, mixing as little as possible, and then fill muffin tins to the top (makes 12 muffins). I had extra streusel topping, so I put some of that on top. Bake at 400F for 15-20 minutes, until the muffins are golden brown on top.

Ed ratings: He really liked the blueberry bars, and was impressed that the crust didn't get soggy. He also really liked the blueberry muffins, but I think that if you put blueberries in a muffin that boy would eat sawdust, so its not exactly an accurate rating. I told him they were all healthy and whole-grain and stuff, and he just shrugged and took a couple to work to munch on.

I thought the muffins were delicious, they definitely tasted whole-wheat-ish, but in a good way, and even fully cooled they were good, and not gummy. The crunchy topping was awesome, as it always is. They didn't last long enough to get a day two evaluation.

Why do all my muffin pictures always end up as a series of muffin demolition shots? Probably has something to do with the fact that I can't not bite into a steaming blueberry muffin if its sitting in front of me...

Peanut Butter Balls

If you like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, you'll probably like these... My chocolate-dipping skills leave a lot to be desired, but the end result tasted delicious. Basically, you mix together butter, peanut butter, and powdered sugar until its dough-like, then you chill the balls in the refrigerator for a while, and then you dip them in melted chocolate. Its heaven. I'd never made candy before, I don't exactly know if this counts, but its close enough. As for the Ed-rating, it was a challenge to make sure he didn't eat them all before the bike race I'd made them for... and he was more than willing to take a decorative bite out of one for the picture. He named a steep price, though--the rest of the ball!



Ingredients:
2C creamy peanut butter (I used crunchy, because its what I have, and it was actually kind of nice to have the peanuts in there)
1 tsp vanilla
4 tbs butter
2-4C powdered sugar
12 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate

In the microwave, melt the butter, peanut butter, and vanilla. Stir it together, and then start adding the powdered sugar. Once it reaches a dough-like consistency, roll the dough into small balls (whatever size you feel is appropriate--smaller for more chocolate, larger for more peanut butter, relative to each other). Put the balls on some waxed paper on a baking sheet and chill in the refrigerator for an hour.

Melt the chocolate in a heat-safe bowl over some boiling water (or a double boiler. I guess that is a double boiler). I think the original recipe called for 9oz of chocolate, and I did that, and I found it almost wasn't enough chocolate. So use the whole bag of chocolate chips. Once the chocolate is melted, roll the peanut butter balls in the chocolate using two forks, and place them back on the tray and chill in the refrigerator. They're fine at room temperature once they've set, but don't leave them in a tent in sunny eighty-degree weather... I speak from experience!

Supposedly these will stay good for weeks at room temp in an airtight container, but mine didn't last that long, so I can't verify that. I don't remember where I found this recipe, either, so if its yours, please say so in the comments and I'll cite you or take it down, as you wish.

Almond Biscotti

I had been under the impression that biscotti were these fancy schmancy cookies that were impossible to make. Well, was I wrong! They do look fancy, but they're really easy to make. And they taste amazing, but we all knew that already.

I stole the recipe from here. That blogger makes much nicer photos and nicer biscotti, too, but I had to try my hand at it. I highly recommend making these--they'll stay fresh (well, as fresh as a crunchy cookie can stay) for weeks, too, another reason to make them =)