Cooking With Hanzipan

I wanted to make breakfast this morning and I’d found bag of whole wheat flour lurking in the back of the kitchen cupboard that I wanted to use. I found this Whole Wheat Apple Muffin recipe on Smitten Kitchen that was calling my name and away I went! You can use the link to see Smitten’s recipe, below is my version (I needed to do some tweaking because I only had one tiny apple and I wanted to put some more things in them).

Whole Wheat Apple Muffins

Adapted from Smitten Kitchen

makes 15 muffins (weird number, huh?)

1 cup  whole wheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup granulated sugar (I didn’t have any so I used raw cane sugar which is fairly coarse and works just fine)
1/2 cup dark brown sugar, packed
1 large egg

1/4 cup applesauce (unsweetened works the best)
2/3 cup buttermilk
1 medium/large apple, cored, and coarsely chopped

1/2 cup raisins

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

1 tablespoon cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 450°F. Grease and flour an 18 cup muffin tin and set aside.

Stir together white sugar, 1/4 cup of the brown sugar, butter and egg. Plop the apple sauce in then gently stir in the buttermilk until just combined. Toss in the baking soda, powder, salt and cinnamon (I forgot to do it in the batter so I just sprinkled it on the tops of the muffins which worked really well) and stir until combined. Add both flours and then toss in the chopped apple, walnuts and raisins, stirring until it’s all folded together and one big lumpy bowl of goodness. Pour into muffin tins, filling them 2/3 of the way. Sprinkle tops with cinnamon if you didn’t add it into the batter then sprinkle the rest (and maybe a touch more) of the brown sugar on top of the muffins. Stick them in the oven for 10 minutes then turn the heat down to 400 for another 7 minutes or until they pass the toothpick test. Allow to cool in the pans for about 10 minutes then transfer onto a wrack. Enjoy!