It has been a while since I've baked any muffins and I was having a craving today. I had a bit of buttermilk to use up, so I went in search of a new recipe. It used to be fairly rare that I would keep buttermilk on hand, and I would get frustrated when it seemed like every muffin recipe I wanted to make called for buttermilk, which I didn't have. Well, wouldn't you know that today, when I had buttermilk, I had a hard time finding a muffin recipe that used it. Sometimes you just can't win.
I also have not done much as much baking with pumpkin this winter as I would have liked to, so when I found this Bon Appetit recipe over at Epicurious that called for pumpkin and buttermilk, I knew this would be the one. I did make several adjustments to the recipe. First, I subbed white whole wheat flour for most of the all-purpose flour. I also cut down the amount of ginger and added a variety of other spices. In addition to the crystallized ginger, I added walnuts for a little crunch - pumpkin and walnuts just go together so nicely.
These muffins are terrific. They are dark and moist, full of flavor from the pumpkin, spices and molasses and have a very nice dome. I could not detect any off taste from the white whole wheat flour whatsoever. If you exclude the walnuts, they are quite low in fat, but even with the walnuts, just 36% of the calories come from fat and since the recipe calls for canola oil, these are low in saturated fat as well. After tasting the final product, I'm glad that I cut down the ginger - the 1 teaspoon of ground ginger combine with the crystallized ginger gave plenty of gingery bite for my tastes. My only complaint - the molasses drowned out the pumpkin flavor a bit, making these taste more like a molasses-ginger type muffin. Perhaps a little less molasses next time?
All around, a great, healthful muffin that will be sure to become part of my regular rotation.
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