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Artisan bread English Muffins

I really am on the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day kick right now.  I can't stress enough how easy the bread is to make, and how great it turns out! I typically use the Light Whole Wheat recipe from the book, and I cheat and bake it in a loaf pan (I don't have a pizza stone, which is the suggested thing to cook the bread on). It has turned out great, it's incredibly cheap to make, and I can make so many different things with the dough that is always ready and waiting in my fridge.

There is an english muffin recipe on the Artisan Bread site, but I wanted something easier, and I wanted to cook my english muffins on a griddle. The official website recipe calls for English muffin forms, and letting the dough rise, baking in the oven, and then the muffins turn out  rounded on one side. That actually *does* offend my sensibilities, so I did things a little differently.  

This is why I love this bread dough - I pulled my dough out of the fridge, freezing cold, and sort of patted it out/rolled it out on a counter sprinkled with cornmeal until it was about 1/4 inch thick (maybe slightly thicker). I made sure that both sides were well coated with cornmeal (yum! A favourite of mine), and with no rest, no rise, no warming up, I cut the muffins out with a clean empty tuna can. Then I put 7 of them on my electric griddle at medium heat. The time to do all this was at most 5 minutes, and it took about 10 minutes of unsupervised cooking to have the muffins finished.  Easy. Cheap. Did I mention easy, and cheap? The English muffins were fantastic to boot! The only thing I may do differently is to let the muffins rise slightly before cooking, more to allow the dough to warm up first - it was hard to get the muffins to cook through to the centre when the dough was so cold.

Whole Wheat Carrot Pineapple Muffins

Whole Wheat Carrot Pineapple Muffins are sort of a 'creation from leftovers' special.  New Year's Eve here at my house was a family friendly affair, and we made eight different kinds of homemade pizza for all the kids and adults.  One of the pizzas we made was a Hawaiin pizza (we'll talk about the steak dinner pizza later!), and I ended up having a half can of pineapple tidbits leftover.  From the veggie tray, I managed to salvage a few carrot sticks - and the inspiration for Carrot Pineapple Muffins was born.  I added in some whole wheat flour, mainly because I have some lingering around, and I thought it would add some flavour and 'healthy' to a nice treat.  The amount of whole wheat flour can be adjusted up, if you'd like more whole wheat in your muffins, but in my experience, a little white flour is needed to lighten them up. If you do try all whole wheat and they turn out great, then let me know, I'd love to hear about it. To get the crushed pineapple called for in the recipe, I whizzed the leftover pineapple tidbits in my food processor until I had something probably more correctly called pureed or pulverized pineapple, but it worked.

For the New Year's Eve party, we had a Nintendo Wii competition for the kids, and a Playstation2 Sing Star competition for the adults!  I highly recommend Sing Star - what a hoot!  I'm pretty confident saying we all had a great time, and I can't wait for the next party.  

Apple Pie Muffins

 

It's been a while. Thanks to the power of Facebook and a little apple spice muffin bragging, here I am posting a new recipe. I was actually craving an apple pie, but that seemed like too much work, so I did a little hunting and came up with this recipe. It's an old recipe I had around, but hadn't made in a long time - I'll definitely have to keep it in the roster. There's a great topping on these, sorta like the top of a Dutch Apple Pie. Enjoy! These are really moist, yummy apple spice muffins. They taste good coming out of the oven, but they're even better the next day.

Oatmeal Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins

So after a month off, and the back to school rush, I'm finally back to my blog. These Oatmeal Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins turned out awesome, and they are low fat as an extra bonus. For an even healthier snack you can substitute some or all of the white flour for whole wheat, and use splenda instead of sugar. I've used regular chocolate chips in this recipe, but I think I will try the miniature chips next time. Either way - bananas and chocolate are a great pair!

Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Muffins.

 say that I don't eat pre-packaged food and stay away from chemical additions, but I have a confession to make - I have a thing for Quaker Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Muffins. The frugal side of me cringes at the thought of buying a package of Muffin mix, but there is just something about it that I like. In the effort to save face, and money, I searched and found an Oatmeal Muffin recipe that is similar to the packaged kind. I added the chocolate chips - what's an Oatmeal Muffin without chocolate chips? - and I'm pretty happy with the results. I think I'll still have the occasional lapse but I'm pretty sure this muffin methadone will help me cut back.