- Simple ingredients: I want to be able to reproduce this recipe with stuff that I already keep stocked in my house. The recipe has to taste pretty spectacular for me to add a new "staple" to my pantry. A recipe gets extra points if I can make it from non-perishables!
- Relatively quick prep time: Cooking isn't my favorite thing in the world, and I work full-time, so I prefer recipes that don't require me to be in the kitchen for more than 30 minutes of sustained time. This is tricky because I'm still learning tricks to speed up prep like chopping skills, etc., but I figure if I can make it in less than 30 minutes, most other people can too.
- Tastes amazing: Well, that's just a given, right?
- Passes the husband test: With both of us having rather different and somewhat picky tastes, this can be hard to accomplish, so when it happens, that recipe is almost always a winner!
- Low-calorie: This is not a NECESSARY requirement, but it's nice to have, especially when the food is a snack-type food. This makes it easier to mix and match my meals so I don't feel like I'm eating the same thing all the time.
So, without further ado, here is my first Fixed Flop Friday recipe!
Low-Calorie Apple Cinnamon Muffins
I started out with this recipe over on Sparkrecipes.com. When I first looked at the recipe, it looked like a fit for my tough standards. The big thing was that I already had all the ingredients in my home, so it would be easy to try out on a random day. It was under 100 calories per serving too, so that was encouraging.
I had some extra time to burn one Saturday afternoon, so I decided to try out the recipe.
Now, before I show and tell you how the recipe flopped, let me make this disclaimer. The original recipe does say "lightly spray muffin pan with cooking spray". But because my 12-muffin muffin pan is rather old and nasty looking, I prefer to use papers on my muffins. Not knowing a ton about baking, this didn't strike me as a problem.
It was a problem.
Problem #1: As you can see, the muffins stuck to the paper like glue. With some of them, you lost about half the muffin to the paper. I figured out this happened because there is virtually no fat in the recipe, so nothing to "grease" the connection between the batter and the paper. This was an easy fix: ditch the papers and actually grease the pan, like the recipe said!
Problem #2: The recipe calls for three apples, cored, peeled and chopped. I felt like the chopped pieces needed to be rather small, so the task of prepping the apples for the recipe was just too much work. I love apples, but I don't love them that much. I decided I would reduce the number of apples to one and try out using my food processor to do the chopping since I wanted pretty small pieces anyway.
Problem #3: The recipe just wasn't sweet enough for my sweet tooth. I usually make muffins to satisfy a sweet tooth, so although some might like a less-sweet muffin, I needed to find a fix. I have finally come to the realization that, although "they" tell you that granulated sugar can be swapped with other sweeteners at a 1:1 ratio, when it comes to actual sweetness levels, this is not true for the powdered form of Stevia, which is what we use in our house. I decided using some "real" sugar along with the Stevia would have to be the solution for this one. I was a little concerned about the calorie count going over my 100-calorie limit that I put on snacks, but it turned out that, after removing two apples, the calories for one serving was just over 100 calories.
So, here's the final product:
As you can see, these babies came out much prettier, and they tasted great! They were also a lot less work since I used the food processor, and they didn't stick to the pan at all. You can also see they didn't last long: we were down to these five in about a day and a half. My husband even took two with him to work for breakfast! So we have a winner!
Here's the recipe:
Apple Cinnamon Muffins
by Healthy Living Together
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup Stevia for baking
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 egg
2/3 cup skim milk
1 small Gala apple (peeled, cored, and chopped)
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Lightly spray muffin pan with cooking spray (do NOT use papers--see above!). Mix all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, Stevia, sugar, salt, baking powder, and cinnamon in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, mix together the applesauce, egg, and milk. Pour applesauce mixture into flour mixture and stir until just blended (don't over-stir). Fold in apples. Spoon mixture into muffin pan. Bake 25 minutes.
Makes 12 muffins. One serving is one muffin! 107 calories per muffin.
MyFitnessPal.com search term: HLT Apple Cinnamon Muffins
This recipe was adapted from SparkRecipes.com.
