Monday, October 13, 2014

Cranberry Oat Eggnog Muffins

Good morning, my poor little neglected blog! Let's start the day off with some delicious muffins, shall we?

It's shopping day, so the fridge is pretty bare. Lately, with homeschooling my kids, I've been taking the easy way out of breakfast, with just cold cereal or maybe branching out to scrambled eggs. Not necessarily the cheapest solution, but definitely fast and easy. However, today we were out of cereal, and had only two eggs. I thought about doing oatmeal, my other recent standby, but was kind of bored with that. So I put on my not-so-lazy pants and made muffins instead.

I made these using the universal muffin formula that I've posted before. I've never had a batch fail using this formula (except once when I forgot oil, and the muffins turned out rather tough). Formula cooking isn't for everyone, some prefer specific ingredients and amounts. But I actually really like recipes that I can play with to come up with new variations. In fact, I rarely follow recipes exactly as written, so formula recipes work really well for me.

Anyway, this was a delicious muffin, full of dried cranberries and oats, with a hint of eggnog flavor. Later in the year, this combo would be great for the holidays.


Cranberry Oat Eggnog Muffins
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole-wheat flour
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 tsp. salt
2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/3 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup oil
1 cup eggnog
1 egg
Additional sugar

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grease muffin pan.

Stir together flours, oats, salt, baking powder, cinnamon, and cranberries. In a separate bowl, whisk together sugar, oil, eggnog, and egg. Add wet ingredients all at once to dry ingredients and stir just until moistened.

Divide the batter evenly between twelve muffin cups in prepared pan. Sprinkle about 1/4 tsp. additional sugar over each muffin. Bake for 20 minutes. Remove to cooling rack immediately.

We liked these split through the middle and spread with butter. Jam would also be good, or even just eat them plain.