Morning Glory Muffins

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These muffins were soooo good!  I combined a bunch of morning glory muffin recipes and picked what I liked and this is what happened.  The kids loved them, too!  They don’t even know there are carrots in them.  They baked up perfectly in my muffin tins with no paper liners.  I found out over reading and experimentation that muffins work best without liners.

Morning Glory Muffins

yield 18 muffins

1 and 1/2 cups AP flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 and 1/4 cups sugar (I used 3/4 cup sugar and 1/2 cup Splenda)
1 Tb. ground cinnamon (yes, one Tablespoon.  Don’t look at me like that)
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
2 cups grated carrot**
1 apple – peeled, cored and grated**
1 cup raisins
3 eggs**
1/2 cup apple butter (substitute: vegetable oil, canola oil or applesauce)
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 Tb. vanilla extract

Topping:
2 Tb. ground flax seed
2 Tb. toasted chopped nuts (I used pecans)
**substitutions:  the apple looked like applesauce after I was done grating it, so feel free to just use 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce instead.  For kids, I use a fine grate on carrots because they are less noticable.  You can do that the long way on your grater, or what I did was use a large grate for the carrots then chopped it in my baby food chopper.  Fine grating a carrot takes a while without this shortcut.  For less cholesterol, use 1 egg and 2 egg whites.

1.  Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Use the muffin method!  What’s that?  The method you almost always use for muffins!

Muffin Method:
a.  Mix dry stuff together in a great big bowl.  (Flours, sugar, cinnamon baking powder, baking soda, salt) Then toss in carrots, apple and raisins.
b.  Mix wet stuff together in a medium bowl. (Eggs, apple butter, oil, and vanilla)
c.  Dump the wet stuff into the middle of the dry stuff and fold gently until it just barely comes together.

2.  Now we have our muffin method batter.  In a greased/sprayed muffin tin, divide the batter between 18 muffins.  Mix together the topping and divide that on top of the muffin.  Press gently into the batter.

3.  Bake 15-20 minutes.  Store airtight up to 3 days.  Or I wrapped mine each in plastic wrap, put them in a plastic bag and throw them in the freezer.  When we want one, we put it in the microwave for 20 seconds for kids, 30 seconds for adults.

Recipe adapted from allrecipes.com
Shared on http://www.skiptomylou.org

Here are photos to prove my kids are eating carrots… in a muffin.  And also the fact they are way cuter than I am.  When it gets warmer, I’ll have to ask someone to take an actually good photo of me.  But until then…. here they are.

Here is Maddox’s creation – the muffin sandwich with apple butter in the middle.