April 26, 2012
I’ve been making an effort to eat breakfast every morning. This is pretty difficult for several reasons: I’m not a morning person and even pouring a bowl of cereal can be too much to handle some days. Also, I’m just not very hungry in the mornings. A cup of coffee is more than enough to fill me up. For these reasons I have to cheat by making myself a “dessert” in the mornings. Basically, something that’s so good, I can’t pass it up. Since they can be made ahead of time, muffins are usually my go-to treat. I’ve made a lot of muffins in my time and they usually fall under delicious but unhealthy or healthy but dry and/or boring. With these peanut butter muffins I feel like I finally found the perfect compromise of healthy but still delicious.
These muffins are packed to gills with nutritious ingredients. They’re made with whole wheat flour and oats and they don’t have any processed sugar (though if you don’t have maple sugar you can use white sugar instead). The recipe doesn’t contain eggs, so the muffins can be made dairy-free with soy milk. In addition to the peanut butter, these muffins also have mashed bananas to make them extra moist. I left them out, but if you wanted to get really crazy you can even add peanuts and raisins! Once the batter is divided up, each muffin is topped with a dollop of fruit preserves. And since I love a good streusel muffin, I added an oat streusel to top everything off.
Despite all the healthy ingredients, the peanut butter shines through and makes these muffins taste a lot more sinful than they are. And with all the fiber and protein they’re very filling so you won’t be tempted to eat too many. I know I’ve made something good when I actually wake up craving one of these for breakfast. You really can’t go wrong starting your day off with one of these peanut butter muffins!
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April 19, 2012
If you couldn’t tell from previous posts I have quite a long list of store-bought-food-I-want-to-learn-to-make-at-home. After I cleared off Spaghetti-Os, Soft Batch cookies were next on the list. They’re probably my second favorite kind of store-bought cookie (because nothing is better than Oreos). I like them so that I can only ever buy the small packs that you get from gas stations because I can’t trust myself around an entire package. If you’re unfamiliar with these cookies, they’re basically what they sound like: extremely soft and chewy chocolate chip cookies. It’s sort of like eating cookie dough but without the threat of getting sick since they’re baked.
I bookmarked this recipe for Soft Batch cookies a while back and finally got around to trying it out earlier this month. That’s when I realized that although I love the texture of those cookies, they don’t really have much flavor other than the chocolate chips. So I decided to change the recipe a bit and add one of my favorite ingredients: peanut butter! I had to do several tests (Is Cookie Recipe Tester a real job? Because I really want that job.) but eventually I found the right ratio of flour to peanut butter that still resulted in cookies with the correct “Soft Batch” texture. In a perfect world, I would add even more peanut butter, but I don’t think you can reduce the flour much more without hurting the structure/texture of the cookies.
To intensify the nutty flavor of these cookies I also used browned butter. One of the important steps in the recipe is reducing some of the water content in the butter. Since that’s pretty much one step away from browning the butter it seemed like the obvious way to go. Other than that, the rest of the recipe is ridiculously easy, you don’t even need a mixer.
The only downside to these cookies is that it’s another recipe, like my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, where you have to wait a certain amount of time before you can actually eat them. The last step involves putting the still warm cookies into an air-tight container. The residual heat steams the cookies which is an important part of giving them that soft texture. You have to let the cookies sit in the sealed container for 24 hours to develop the best flavor and texture. It’s tough to have a box of cookies in your kitchen that you can’t eat for a whole day, but they’re definitely worth the wait!
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Recent Posts
April 11, 2012
When it comes to dinner, Mexican food is my big weakness. I don’t go out to eat too much anymore, especially compared to five plus years ago when Brandon and I dined out more days than we ate at home, but I can’t give up my Mexican food. I go to my favorite Mexican restaurant at least every other week, sometimes more often. Whenever we move to a new town, finding a Mexican restaurant with a decent chimichanga and good queso blanco is my number one priority. And there have been some places (*cough* Jacksonville) where that meant trying out pretty much every Mexican restaurant in town.
I know I shouldn’t eat at the Mexican restaurant so much, though. It’s probably one of unhealthiest meals you can have. So whenever I see a Mexican-ish recipe in one of my many low fat/light cookbooks I always try it in the hopes of finding something satisfying that’s not totally unhealthy. …
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April 6, 2012
I was hoping to get a new recipe up here this week but several work deadlines haven’t left me with much free time. So with Easter coming up I thought it would be a good time to post a round up of my favorite Spring recipes. At the end I also included a few links to fun looking Spring/Easter recipes from some of my favorite food bloggers. Check them out!
I’ll be back next week with a new recipe. Hint: it’s not very Springy but it’ll be great for Cinco de Mayo next month. 
March 21, 2012
Spring is officially here! And in the spirit of spring cleaning I’ve started going through my packed freezer to finally use up the last of the fruit that I froze last year. I got a ton of blueberries and blackberries from my CSA and have been using them in muffins all winter but after last week’s Pop Tart adventure I didn’t really want muffins or anything too carb-y. I’ve been craving a lemon dessert lately and lemons always pair well with berries so this was the perfect opportunity to finally make something.
Even though lemons are technically a summer fruit, there’s really nothing else that evokes Spring to me as much as a lemon. It’s just so fresh and bright, like the colorful blooms that are popping up all around my neighborhood these days. It’s the perfect thing to help transition between the stark coldness of winter and the hot sunniness of summer.
I had bookmarked a recipe …
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March 14, 2012
Just like Spaghetti-os and Oatmeal Cream Pies, Pop Tarts are one of those things I loved when I was kid but have tried to stay away from as an adult. But since I had so much fun learning to make those other favorites at home, I figured it was time I finally attempted a Pop Tart. With the other recipes I was trying to make a homemade version that was close to the taste and texture of the originals. This time I wanted to make a healthier Pop Tart. But one that still, you know, tastes good. And while this recipe isn’t especially low fat (by my calculations it’s about the same as the store bought version), after some trial and error I feel like I came up with a satisfying compromise.
A Pop Tart is pretty much just pie crust with some type of filling, so the pastry dough is the most important part. I tried out several …
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