Okay.
These are incredible.
You know when you go apple picking and they sell these crazy apple cider donuts that you can’t stop eating? Well this is the home version. There’s no frying with these, and the ingredients are shockingly NOT unhealthy, but more important than that on this special day is that they are over-the-top mouthwateringly delicious and everyone in house agrees, including Queen Fussypants herself, Juliet.
And today’s special day? It’s Jeff’s birthday. Jeff is one of my brothers, and today is his birthday, and he deserves something special. So while his family is celebrating him, I am honoring him with these unbearably delicious mini muffins. We’ll have to continue to honor him by eating them, since he lives about 10 hours away by car, and won’t be showing up to claim them anytime soon.
So on to the recipe! I gathered up the ingredients, and took pictures of them, and because I always leave one thing out of my ingredient pictures by accident, I didn’t include an egg. At least it made it into the recipe, unlike the sugar that never went into the ill-fated cheesecake. (Can you tell I am still haunted by that?)
Just pretend there’s an egg there.
I started with dry ingredients: whole wheat white flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. It said to use two teaspoons of cinnamon; my teaspoons were extremely generous. I whisked.
Then I got out another bowl for the strange concoction I was about to create.
I put in the egg and the brown sugar. Then it was time for apple butter. Oddly enough, I already had some on hand, I’d picked it up at Trader Joe’s for a different recipe that I still haven’t had a chance to make. I poured it in.
Then vanilla, and after that, honey.
Then the apple cider, the only ingredient I had to go to the store for.
After that it was yogurt (Greek, 2%, since I just bought some yesterday) and a little bit o’ canola oil. Using yogurt in baking is rarely pretty.
But whisking usually turns things around. At least in baking.
Better, right? I thought so. I poured it into the flour mixture.
Once combined, I spooned it into my mini muffin tray. The recipe said it would make 24, but when I looked at the photos on it I realized that the author has a much bigger tray than mine. I had a lot left over after creating this:
I popped them into the oven, set the timer for 10 minutes, and made the cinnamon sugar. I decided to skip the butter, as I so often do, usually with good results.
Then I took the remaining butter and made regular size muffins out of it. I got exactly six, and sprinkled the cinnamon sugar on top.
When the mini muffins were ready, I took them out. The larger ones caved in a bit in the middle, but I decided I sort of liked that effect. It made them a little bit donut-like, and since they really descended from donuts in the evolutionary chain, it seemed appropriate.
I forgot to take a picture until I’d already removed the first couple and rolled them in cinnamon sugar, so a few are missing.
Here’s the first set that I rolled in the cinnamon sugar.
Once I’d done a bunch of them, I called the kids in.
Nathaniel wasn’t ready to eat, having just consumed a granola bar, and you can’t really order your child to consume a donut-style-mini-muffin if he’s full of granola bar. It just feels like a bad parental choice. But Juliet, usually reluctant to dig into anything new, happily picked one up. Then she showed me just how happy it made her once she’d crammed the whole thing into her mouth.
She loved them! She ate three of them!
The big ones were ready a few minutes later. They turned out great.
And there you have it. Dave came home a little while later and he and Nathaniel dug in with joy. The three of them went out to the Grange Fair today, so they took a bunch of the mini muffins with them. I am staying home for some much-needed down time, fun as the fair can be. My plans include more baking, impromptu napping, and very loud music. And maybe just one more mini muffin.
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