Last night, Brad and I went over to his sister’s house so that his brother-in-law could help me with some of the math I’ve been studying for the GRE. We were a little worried about inviting ourselves but his sister told his mom (his mom is the only one who openly shows emotion on a regular basis so she’s always the middleperson) that she hoped we wouldn’t stop coming over after I was done with the GRE.
One of the things I’m really terrible at is fractions, which may sound kind of ridiculous coming from someone who loves to bake. And there is a certain comfort in fractions – they make more sense to my visual brain than decimals. It’s just the crazy things they do to each other in mathematic equations that confuse me, because I want them to stand on their own.
So I’ve been concentrating on one of my shortcuts in an effort to get myself used to playing with fractions, a shortcut that I wanted to share with you.
- 2 golden delicious apples (about 1 1/2 cups)
- 3/4 cups of whole wheat spelt flour
- 3/4 cups of whole wheat flour
- 1/3 cup of sugar
- 1 1/2 tspns of baking powder
- 1/4 tspn of baking soda
- 1/2 cup of margarine, melted
- 1 cup of sour cream
- 1/4 cup of Eggbeaters
- 1 tspn of vanilla
- 1/2 cup of cinnamon chips
Cut the apples into quarters, core them, then carefully peel all but one quarter (set that one aside for now). Chop them into bite-sized pieces. Slice the remaining one-quarter as thinly as you can, aiming for 12 separate slices.
apple slices
Preheat the oven to 400F.
In a large bowl, sift the dry ingredients together with a whisk. One of my tricks is to try to use as few measuring implements as possible, so I used a quarter-cup measure, a third-cup measure, and a quarter-teaspoon. I also keep all of them sitting on a clean spot on the counter until I’m finished (or they’re too “dirty” to be used again) so that I can use those measures repeatedly.
In a 2-cup measuring cup, I poured 1/2 cup of cool, clean water. With a big spoon, I added the margarine to the water – the bigger the scoops, the better – until the two together reached 1 cup. Carefully, I drained the water out, using the spoon to hold the margarine back. Then I melted the margarine at least part of the way and put it into a small bowl. In the same measuring cup, I poured the 1/4 cup of Eggbeaters. I added sour cream until both together reached the 1 1/4 cup line. Then I poured both into the bowl with the butter, and added the vanilla – using the 1/4 teaspoon measure that I saved from before.
The last step was to pour this mixture into the dry stuff, along with the chopped apple pieces and cinnamon chips. Rather than mixing it all and then checking at the end to make sure everything had been moistened, thus possibly ruining the rising action by handling the batter too much, I check as I go, stirring in the very beginning but then folding up from as many different places on the bottom as I can to make sure there aren’t any pockets of dryness.
After buttering the muffin cups with a quick spray of Pam in each, I scooped the batter into each cup. You can fill them pretty full; I held back a little and ended up with 15 small muffins rather than 12 regular-sized ones. Then I put the apple slices on top and put them in the oven for 20 minutes. When a fork poked in the middle came out clean, even though they seemed a little squishy still, they were done.
The original recipe is here.
Next time: Peel the whole apple first; the peel of the sliced apples on top was pretty tough and hard to chew. Maybe cook the muffins a little longer to try to get some more of the moisture out of them.
