Tag: muffins

Pumpkin Walnut Muffins for World Vegan Day

Happy World Vegan Day!

To celebrate, I’m going to share another recipe from Dough, vegan Pumpkin Walnut Muffins. This was one of our most popular muffins at the bakery and while we made it year round, it’s particularly suited to this season.  And bonus, these muffins don’t require any weird ingredients. It’s all stuff you can get at any grocery store.

vegan pumpkin walnut muffins

Pumpkin Walnut Muffins

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour (or half all-purpose & half whole wheat pastry flour)
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1 cup canned pumpkin (just pumpkin, not pie filling)
1/2 cup non-dairy milk
1/2 cup oil
2 tablespoons molasses
1/2 cup chopped walnuts plus one walnut half for top of each muffin

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Line muffin tin with 12 liners.

2. Whisk together the dry ingredients, flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and spices in a mixing bowl. In a another bowl, whisk together pumpkin, milk, oil, and molasses. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and stir until just mixed. Stir in chopped walnuts.

3. Fill the muffin cups about 3/4 with batter or if you have one with #12 scoop. Put a walnut half on the top of each muffin. Bake for 20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

vegan pumpkin walnut muffin closeup

Random Collection of Food

I don’t feel very writey right now, but here are a few food pics that have been piling up.

The Cajun Tofu from Yellow Rose Recipes has turned out to be a great quick week night dinner star. Once you have the spice mixture around, the rest can be made up of staples I keep around. This time we had it with some of the collards that are filling my freezer and some hash browns that cooked up quicker because I diced ’em smaller. Oh, and that’s a little bowl of home made apple sauce.

When I saw this fairly quick recipe for bread bowls, I knew I’d eventually be dumping come Cholent from Veganomicon into them. I was right! The dry milk powder was replaced with soy milk powder.

Trying to keep the healthy cruise diet going, I baked up some Asian tofu and ate it on a salad of raw kale and bok choy seasoned with sesame oil.

And finally, this Peanut Butter Quick Bread recipe looked interesting. I thought it would be even more interesting as Peanut Butter and Jelly Bread. So that’s what I did. The bread itself is not all that sweet like a lot of quick breads, so the jelly does not make it too sweet. I veganized by using a flax egg and soy milk as replacements. The recipe worked in both bread and muffin form.

A tale of two muffins

What’s better than baking a batch of muffins? Baking two! For the first batch, I modified the Zucchini Muffin recipe from Yellow Rose Recipes to make it carrot and zucchini. Not much of a modification…just reduced the zucchini and added grated carrot. I also skipped the raisins and opted to toast the pecans in a pan before chopping and adding. We’ll call these the healthy muffins. They have a really small amount of oil and are light on the sugar but they’re still sweat enough and don’t at all taste like hippie food. Plus I got to break in the whole nutmeg I picked up at the Indian market. Wow, does that make a difference! I even cut back the amount a bit so it wouldn’t overpower.

carrot zucchini muffins 

And these Hearty Spiced Cocoa Muffins we’ll refer to as pure evil. This might be my first try at a recipe from The Joy of Vegan Baking.  The heavy reliance on Ener-G Egg Replacer in the book made me a bit nervous as I don’t like it in everything. In this case I had nothing to worry about. They came out perfect and kick much ass. The cinnamon, cloves and cayenne pepper go so well with the chocolate and the higher than usual amount of salt really makes the chocolate flavor pop. I just stuck with the chocolate chips and did not add any nuts. 

Hearty Spiced Cocoa Muffins 

I think it’s kind of funny that I chose to photograph the “evil” muffins against black and the “good” ones against white. Hmmm… Oh, and my helpful tip of the day, well, and probably of the year because I don’t really hand them out, now do I? How often does a muffin recipe make exactly 12 muffins? Not often, right? I have these little muffin cup sized ceramic ramekins  that I use for mise en place, salsa, etc. They’re also perfect for overflow muffin batter. See above. No wasted batter!

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins

With the cake finally gone, it was time to move on to the next food project. I had some pumpkin puree in the freezer so how about some pumpkin chocolate chip muffins? I used this recipe but instead of the whole wheat flour used unbleached white flour. Why pretend these are going to be healthy, right? Anyway, they’re yummy!

pumpkin chocolate chip muffins

Banana Nut Muffins

I ordered both issues of Don’t Eat Off the Sidewalk cookzine a couple of weeks ago and finally this weekend got around to making one of the recipes. I had some gushy bananas waiting for me when I returned from Virginia, so the Banana Nut Muffins were a perfect choice. She’s right…these are wonderfully moist and I love the topping. I used walnuts instead of pecans because it’s what I had but you all probably know that walnuts & bananas love each other. Oh, and you can’t taste the flax seeds in these at all. So you can pretend they’re all healthy and shit. You know, looking back at the recipe, they actually are a bit healthier than most muffin recipes. Bonus!

banana nut muffins

You know how you have a couple of muffin’s worth of batter left but don’t want to bake another whole pan for just a couple of muffins? I have these mini ceramic cups I use for mise en place, sauces, etc. I just plop the excess in those and bake along side the rest. The ceramic is a little slower to warm in the oven than the metal pan, so their doneness will be slightly different from the big batch. But I’ve also found if you take them out at about the same time, since the ceramic holds heat, they will continue to cook a little and “catch up” to the rest of the muffins.

single banana nut muffin

See that black spot in the second photo? I’ve started getting these on some, but not all, of my photos with this camera. I’ve tried cleaning the lens, but that hasn’t helped. My digital camera is 3+ years old. Maybe it’s time to break down and get a new one.