Carrot Bran Muffins with Streusel Topping

This is a great recipe: Streusel Carrot Muffins from Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain. It's a coffee cake disguised as muffins. But it has all the healthy breakfast stuff like lots of oat bran, whole grain flour, carrots and not so much sugar. That said, I couldn't leave the recipe alone.

I didn't have spelt flour. So I substituted with sorghum flour which I have left from way back when I experimented with gluten free baking. My carrots are tiny so I grated 4 of them. I got 2 cups and ended up using all of it. I didn't have allspice. So I upped the cinnamon and added a bit of cloves. I didn't want to melt butter. So I used oil. I didn't have buttermilk. So I substituted with soy milk and lemon juice.

The muffins came out moist, mildly spicy with sweet, buttery and crunchy streusel. I knew streusel was the key so I went all out - followed the recipe to the T (well - except I substituted whole wheat flour for spelt flour.) What a great idea to incorporate bran in the toppings. Here's what I ended up using:



Ingredients - adapted from Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain

• 1 cup sorghum flour


• 3/4 cup all purpose flour


• 1/4 cup oat bran


• 1 teaspoon baking powder


• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda


• 1 teaspoon salt


• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon


• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves


• 2 tablespoons light tasting olive oil


• 1/2 cup brown sugar


• 1 large egg


• 1 cup soy milk mixed with juice from 1 lemon


• 2 cups grated carrot

Streusel

• 1/3 cup whole wheat flour


• 2 tablespoons oat bran


• 3 tablespoons raw sugar


• A pinch of salt


• 3 tablespoons cold butter

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a muffin pan with liners. (I didn't want a mess from all the crumbs when trying to extract the muffins from the pan. Normally I don't use liners with muffins.) I got 11 muffins from this recipe.


2. Combine sorghum flour, all purpose flour, oat bran, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and cloves in a large bowl.


3. In another clean bowl, whiks oil, sugar, egg and soy milk + lemon juice together. Add to the flour mixture. Add grated carrots. Fold the ingredients together until only a few streaks remain.


4. Spoon into the prepared muffin pan. Set aside.


5. Make the streusel. In a clean bowl, combine all the streusel ingredients. Rub everything together with fingertips until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Sprinkle over the batter.


6. Fill the empty space with water. Bake for 25 minutes. Let cool in the pan for a few minutes. Remove from the pan and let cool on a cooling rack.

Carrot Cupcakes with Maple Cream Cheese Frosting

I'm loving using spices in my baked goods right now. For this birthday party, at first I was going make my default green tea cupcakes or chocolate cupcakes. But I decided to go back to the basics with this Old-Fashioned-Carrot-Cake from Bon Appetit.



I omitted the nuts and reduced the amount of sugar to 1 1/2 cups. The cupcakes came out plenty sweet and very very moist with just a hint of spice. I baked them for about 25 minutes at 350 degrees oven and got 24 cupcakes.



I halved the frosting recipe and had just enough for all the cupcakes. I even broke out my cake decorating set which my bother gave me last year for my birthday. Look at them. They are so pretty looking with those fancy dollops of frosting.

Carrot Cake Cookies

I would like to call them mini carrot cake balls in stead of cookies. They didn't expand in the oven. I used a mini ice cream scoop to drop the dough and didn't press them before going into the oven expecting them to expand. But they didn't. So after I sandwiched them they became cute little balls.



The balls were delicious. They were soft and delicate with a hint of spices. Oatmeal added a perfect chewy texture. They got enthusiastic nods from everybody trying them. Thanks, Martha Stewart. I didn't use her cream cheese frosting recipe, though. I thought the cookies came out super sweet. I wanted something a bit tart and creamy to balance it. So for the frosting, I just whipped 12oz. (1 1/2 packages) of cream cheese with only 1/2 cup of confectioner sugar.