foodgonewild

I love muffins and have been avoiding doing any baking because of the need to soak the flour. I had not found a recipe I wanted to try, and was not sure soaking would yield the texture of a fluffy but heavy muffin.  (What does soaking flour mean?)  Soaking flour overnight on a workday means that I usually forget about my batter in the morning, so I decided to try the recipe from Nourishing Traditions the weekend before last.

Start with:

3 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups yogurt

– soak overnight at room temperature–

This is what the batter looked like the night before.

The next morning I preheated the oven to 325, stirred in the remaining ingredients, and made muffins.

Remaining ingredients:

2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 cup maple syrup
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla
3 tbs melted butter

They smelled SO good. They have to cook for 1 hour, as per the recipe. So for the last half hour, they were smelling yummmmmmy.  But the stupid teasing muffins came out like little hockey pucks!  John and I were throwing them at each other, but they really hurt so we had to stop. I’m not sure what I did wrong with this recipe. Unfortunately, they didn’t taste very good either.  They just tasted like every other soaked recipe I have made with whole wheat flour and yogurt – toasty, mildly tart, and yogurty.  They went into the trashcan, all 24 of them.

I was going to set out to find another soaked flour muffin recipe, but at the same time, I decided to try to avoid wheat for a while. My skin has been itchy (sorry that’s a little gross in the middle of a muffin post), but really, it has. So I’m dodging all forms of wheat for about a month, maybe longer, to see if I have an intolerance. Enter a new discovery:  coconut flour.  I will save my “all hail the holy coconut” post for another day, but I love those things – shredded coconut, toasted coconut, coconut oil, milk, water, and now flour. It’s a miracle fruit. I should consider a way to pay homage. Perhaps a creative Halloween costume.

Two pints of huge fresh organic blueberries and a bag of coconut flour, and I was set to make these yummy muffins by Ann Marie at Cheeseslave. The recipe seems perfect, but I don’t think I followed it accurately. These muffins came out better than the hockey pucks, but had a bit of an eggy texture. They were really blue, and didn’t want to come out of the muffin cups despite their oiliness. I’m pretty sure I just used too many blueberries!

You can see this little muffin even has a bit of a grimace, sort of like a muffin jack-o-lantern.  These guys weren’t very happy.  Don’t get me wrong, I still ate them all, scraping the crumbly bits out of their muffin papers. I just wished mine had turned out as well as Ann Marie’s. (I’ll try again, the flavor was divine! Just … following the recipe exactly the next time around!)

A few days after I ran out of blueberry muffins, I was inspired by Kimi’s introduction to fall, Spiced Apple Muffins.  These muffins came out perfect!! I made a single batch of 10 and they were gone within 24 hours. So I went ahead and made a double batch for the second run – also perfect! I eat these gently warmed and spread with pasture butter. The butter is not needed, but I’m always looking for ways to get even more (and more and more!) butter into my diet. These muffins were great for a road trip I took on Saturday. I put them in the dash of the car so they were nice and warm when we wanted a snack!

Eight little muffins left from the twenty. I’ve been trying to resist eating the remainder of them in one sitting. I’m not sure if there would be any digestive effects from overindulging in coconut flour.

Just a little crock (of butter). I took this on my road trip, and now have refilled it and brought it to the office so I always have butter on hand.