Blueberry Coffee Cake Muffins!

Time for another baking project! I'm going for a new baked good just about every week now. While not all of them are blog worthy (a repeat recipe cinnamon roll batch and a last-minute pizza--see below), I did enjoy experimenting with a recipe my mom gave me for blueberry coffee cake. Since I didn't have the 9x13-inch pan or the yogurt she used in her original recipe, I opted to make muffins with half the batter, and a loaf cake with the other half. I think it turned out quite nicely for such an adaptation. Let's call them Blueberry Coffee Cake Muffins:

Ingredients:

2 and 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour plus extra for dusting

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Dash of salt

1 and 1/3 cups brown sugar

1 egg

1/3 cup of oil

12 ounces buttermilk (instead of yogurt that my mom used)

1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 cups frozen blueberries (Mom's original recipe called for fresh blueberries but this was all I had)

Directions:

1.) Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. In a large bowl, sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together.

2.) In a separate bowl combine the brown sugar, egg, oil, buttermilk, and applesauce. Slowly and carefully add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, stirring until just combined, then pour the batter in 12 muffin cups lined with paper and a loaf pan sprayed with nonstick cooking spray.

3.) Rinse the blueberries and dust them in a little bit of flour so they won't sink in the muffins. Drop about 4-6 blueberries into each muffin, pushing them deeper into the batter with a spoon. Layer just a little bit of extra batter on top of the blueberries in the muffins so they can barely be seen. Fold the rest of the blueberries into the loaf pan batter.

4.) Bake the muffins and the loaf separately for approximately 22 minutes each (may be a little light on the muffins, but I like them that way. The loaf came out perfect with the toothpick test).

5.) Allow both to cool slightly before eating! You can spread butter on the loaf or eat the muffins with sugar dusted on top.

These turned out nice and fluffy with just the right amount of sweetness without being too sweet. I like how the muffins rose and spread to a nice size as well. And then there's the health factor--less guilt with whole wheat flour, applesauce, and blueberries to make this treat a little more wholesome. It really hit the spot when I taste tested the loaf for breakfast and the muffins for lunch!

Cinnamon rolls and pizza from this week:

It's good to be baking again.

Buttermilk Banana Bread!

I'm trying to bake a lot more this summer. To help get me back into a groove, I started small. Peanut butter bananas dipped in dark chocolate (a slightly messy no-bake--see photo at end). Refrigerator cookie dough into chocolate chip cookies. Then a Pecan Pie from my holiday recipe collection to honor my grandmother. Finally, today, I just up and baked banana bread. Loosely based on the previously posted Banana Chocolate Bread, today I went chocolate free (no cocoa powder in the house...) and substituted buttermilk for milk (because we lactose intolerants don't tend to keep milk around the house either...). It was a bit of an experiment since I had to adapt the previous recipe's self-rising flour concept, and I didn't know if my bananas were ripe enough, and darned if I couldn't figure out what order to put the ingredients together in, but the timing was perfect and the results a delicious golden brown. This Buttermilk Banana Bread is taste test approved!

Ingredients:

1 and 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour (my go-to flour for healthy baking)
1/4 teaspoon plus 1/8 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon plus 1/8 teaspoon salt
2 small-to-medium bananas
2/3 cup canola oil
2 eggs
1/2 cup white sugar
3 Tablespoons buttermilk (I had 2% on hand)

Directions: 

1.) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a medium bowl, combine the oil, sugar and eggs and beat to thoroughly combine (I just used a fork).

2.) In a separate bowl, sift the flour, baking powder, and salt together. Add 2 Tablespoons of buttermilk and mix again.

3.) In a small bowl, mash your bananas. This is where I added my final 1 Tablespoon of buttermilk so that the bananas would be easier to whisk up. Add the egg mixture to the flour mixture, stirring slowly, then mix in the mashed bananas until the batter comes together (it's okay if it's still a little lumpy. Banana bread should be lumpy!).

4.) Pour batter into a loaf pan greased with nonstick cooking spray and bake approximately 40 minutes (Forty minutes gave it the perfect brown around the edges, crispy on the outside but still moist on the inside. Still, check your oven just to be sure as temperatures may vary). Remove from the oven and let cool at least 10 minutes before removing from pan and transferring to a wire rack to cool completely (though it tastes best warm).

Check out my other baking projects this month!