Muffin Mondays

For those of you longtime English Muffin Blog readers, you may remember a little series from back in the early EMB days called Muffin Mondays. That was an over-ambitious idea of mine, to feature a muffin recipe that I baked over the weekend every Monday morning along with pretty photos. Needless to say, it was a little tricky to keep up. However, I've been on a baking kick as of late and thought you might like the recipe for one of my favourite new muffins, Maple Oatmeal Apple Muffins - they're so good!

For those of you living in the northern hemisphere, these muffins are perfectly timed with the abundance of maple syrup available right now. For everyone else, I highly recommend splurging on the good stuff because the delicious maple flavour really makes all the difference. I've substituted white flour with whole wheat, and rolled oats with steel cut oats. The steel cut oats give the muffins a little crunch and delicious nutty flavour. Dare I say these muffins are actually good for you? Even my most picky eater (Big Chuck) said "I really like the healthy bits!". Well, now I can die happy.

Maple Oatmeal Apple Muffins

(this is my version of Food.com's recipe)

• 1 cup steel cut oats

• 1 cup apple chopped into bit-sized pieces

• 1/2 cup plain yoghurt

• 1 egg

• 2 tbsp. canola oil

• 2/3 cup maple syrup

• 1 1/4 cups whole wheat pastry* flour

• 2 1/2 tsp. baking powder

• 1/2 tsp. baking soda

• 1/2 tsp. salt

• 1/3 cup walnuts

1. Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees. Soak the steel cut oats in enough warm water to cover them for 15 minutes. Drain off the excess water.

2. Combine the oats, apple, yoghurt, egg, canola oil and maple syrup in a medium bowl.

3. In a larger bowl combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and nuts.

4. Fold the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients. Careful not to overmix.

5. Spoon batter** into 12 muffin cups.

6. Bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes or until an inserted toothpick comes clean.

* I didn't use pastry flour, just plain old all purpose whole wheat, they still turned out super yummy :)

** You may find the muffin batter to be a little wetter than usual, that's due to the excess water from soaking the steel cut oats. Don't worry though, the little oats will soak it all up as they bake.

Enjoy!

Have a great Monday!

xo bess