Recipe Source: King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking. The Countryman Press, Woodstock, 2006 pp. 38-9
So baking eggless cupcakes for Fearless Toddler's preschool class and a heraldically colored birthday cake for a family birthday party, not to mention scads of bread for the same party, did not exempt me from accommodating Muffin Madness. There were still people in the house. They would still need to be fed, and what they wanted was muffins. I had kind of gotten bored with the usual basic recipe I'd been following so I figured I'd try something a little different. I wanted something that would give a little more protein than the usual suspects. Now that the pediatrician has lifted the ban on tree nuts I'll admit I've gone a little overboard with them, so I decided to use almond butter. I can get it quite cheaply at my big box bulk product membership warehouse store. I made the muffins and I was quite happy with them, although they went stale a little sooner than I'd have preferred.
On a hunch, I did a quick search on Fearless Kitchen to see if I'd already done this. You know, before the child was eating solid food at all.
And I found this recipe.
I decided to write it up and post it anyway, because I can never do the same thing twice no matter what. The last time I ran out of almond butter and had to make up the difference with Nutella. This time I ran into no such problems. This was a pure almond muffin. I skipped the chocolate chips and instead toasted some almonds, chopped them up and chucked them into the batter. I still omitted the glaze in an effort to keep these as a breakfast item rather than a dessert. I also didn't have any pastry flour on hand so I was limited to regular whole wheat flour, leading me to inclrease the buttermilk slightly. The results were very different, and very good.
Almond Muffins (makes 12; approx. $0.65/serving)
7 1/2 ounces whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 stick butter
3 3/4 ounces brown sugar (light or dark)
7 1/8 ounces almond butter
1 1/2 teaspoons almond extract
2 eggs
7 ounces buttermilk
1 1/2 cups chopped toasted almonds
Equipment:
- Some combination of muffin tins leading up to twelve cups
- Stand mixer with paddle attachment
- Ice cream scoop
- Muffin liners
- Cooking spray
- Flexible spatula
- Preheat your oven to 375︒.
- Spray your muffin tins. Line them with the papers and spray the papers too. This might be excessive. You can probably get away with one or the other. I always do both.
- Cream the butter and sugar together in the bowl of the stand mixer until light.
- Add the almond butter. Mix until thoroughly incorporated. Check to see that there is a little "Inc." after it. Seriously, it'll be there when you're ready to proceed.
- Add the eggs and almond extract, one at a time. I like to scrape after each addition, this might be a bit much.
- Combine your dry ingredients. Add in alternating additions with the buttermilk, starting and ending with the dry ingredients.
- When everything has been mixed in, fold in the almonds.
- Use the ice cream scoop to portion the batter evenly between muffin cups.
- Bake 23 - 25 minutes or until a tester comes out clean.
- Cool in the pan 5 minutes.
- Turn out onto a rack to finish cooling.
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