Cherry Almond Muffins

I wanted to make muffins this morning and hand to work with what was around the house.  This is what came out.  If I were doing it again, I'd want them to be slightly more moist (they were about the consistency of a cornmeal muffin -- slightly crusty outside, which was good, but also a slightly dry & crumbly inside once they cooled, which was less good), but otherwise they were very tasty.  The comments on the site suggested using sour cream or applesauce to make them more moist, so maybe I'll try those.  Based on this bread recipe.

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
  
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1/2 cup dried tart cherries -- I used 1/4 cup whole and 1/4 cup chopped, and I liked the whole better
• 3/8 cup milk
• 1 eggs
• 3 Tbs. butter, melted
• 1 Tbs. oil (this was an attempt to make them moister, use all butter if you want)
• 1 tsp. almond extract 

Mix the four dry ingredients together.  Add the cherries & mix to cover them.  In a separate bowl, mix the 5 wet ingredients.  Pour them into the dry mixture and mix until just combined (mine had streaks of egg still in it and it was fine; next time I'll try mixing it even less, still trying to get the hang of the muffin mixing method).  Butter six muffin cups & split batter between them; if you want muffins with tops, butter only five muffin cups -- these don't rise very much, so you can fill the cups basically to the top.  Bake at 350 until a knife comes out clean from the middle (or just before that would happen) -- I don't remember how long this took, but it was somewhere between 20-40 minutes. 

Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffin Cupcakes

I love pumpkin.  Pumpkin flavored things are the best.  And now it's close enough to fall (even if it is nearly 90 degrees here) that I don't have to feel bad about using it!

I saw these on reddit & thought they looked fantastic; I thought right.  I ended up putting off making them for almost a week because I kept forgetting to create the little cream cheese filling bites in the freezer early enough that I could do the whole process.  I'd call them closer to cupcakes than muffins; they're ridiculously sweet & too squishy to be a muffin.

http://www.annies-eats.com/2010/10/08/pumpkin-cream-cheese-muffins/

I only filled 5/8 of the muffins, and I only made half as much topping as suggested (so that I could leave some of them plain), but other than that I basically followed the recipe.

For the filling:
5 oz. neufchatel cheese (the lower fat version of cream cheese)
5/8 cup powdered sugar

For the muffins:
2.5 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp. ground cinnamon (heaping)
1 tsp. ground nutmeg (heaping)
1 tsp. ground cloves (a little less, because it turns out grinding cloves with a mortar & pestle is really difficult)
1 tbsp. plus 1 tsp. cinnamon + nutmeg (because I didn't have pumpkin pie spice & it's close enough)
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
4 egg substitutes
2 cups sugar
2 cups pumpkin puree
1¼ cups vegetable oil

For the topping:
1/4 cup sugar
2.5 tbsp. flour
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
2tbsp. cold(ish) unsalted butter, cut into pieces

Make the filling by mashing the two ingredients together.  Shape into 15 roughly equally sized piles/balls on wax paper (the piles should be small enough around to fit well inside the muffin cups).  Stick it in the freezer for an hour or two.

Mash together the topping ingredients until the butter's in tiny pieces & the color is mostly uniform.  Set it aside.

Mix together the dry ingredients (except sugar), in another bowl mix together the wet ingredients (plus sugar).  I couldn't get the wet ingredients to combine very well (oil + water-based egg replacer = no mix), so I just dumped them all together and mixed them there & it worked out fine.  This is a big recipe.  It was almost too big for my biggest bowl, so keep that in mind if your bowls are smallish.

Put paper cupcake cup liners into your cupcake pan.  Put a little bit of batter in the cup (it's ok if you almost totally fill it, you'll just have to press the cream cheese bit down into it), put in the cream cheese piece, then cover it with more batter.  If you follow the recipe above you'll get 15 +cream cheese, 9 -cream cheese.  Cover the cupcakes with the topping (be generous enough to cover the whole thing, but you don't need to heap it on.  One forkful was enough for each of mine) -- the recipe above will give you 18 +topping, 6 -topping.

Stick them into a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes or so.  If your oven cooks unevenly like mine does, turn them 180 degrees after 15 minutes.  Take them out, let them cool (the filling is pretty warm), then avoid eating too many in one sitting.

My picture ended up a little discolored -- believe me when I say they're as delicious looking as they were on the website, with gorgeous streuselly topping on top.