Madhuram's EgglessCooking.com | Eggless Recipes | Egg Free Baking

I have a big jar of peanut butter at home and wanted to finish it before it expires in a couple of months. We are not a “peanut-butter-family” but for my son who likes it on breads and rotis. I have never baked with peanut butter so far, so I thought I will give it a try. I came across a lot of baking recipes using peanut butter in Esther Brody’s “1500 Best Bars, Cakes, Cookies, Muffins and More”. The following recipe for oatmeal peanut butter muffins is inspired from 3 recipes in that book.

Recently I borrowed “The 250 Best Muffin Recipes” by Esther Brod from the local library. I don’t know if they are the best muffin recipes unless I try each recipe but the variety is really very good though. Actually it has bonus 250 recipes, so totally 500 muffin recipes in one book, with a lot of healthy recipes too. I was amazed by the collection of recipes using oatmeal, oat bran, wheat bran, whole wheat flour and wheat germ. It should easily reach at least 100-150 recipes. Especially there are a lot of oatmeal and oat bran muffins recipes. Since this month’s Whole Grain Baking theme is Oats, I decided to proceed with the Apple Walnut Oat Bran Muffins. (Please note that Oat bran alone is not whole grain, but for this event I’m accepting recipes with oat bran also). I had some bland pears in the fridge and nobody was willing to eat it so decided to use it instead of apple (more about this in the Taste and My Notes section). I have also used apple cider vinegar instead of the egg whites mentioned in the original recipe.

Do you have a collection of truly tried and tested recipes, which you would like to pass down to the generation to come? If I make a such a list, this recipe for chocolate chip muffins will definitely find place in it. This healthy muffin recipe is from the book Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld. This book is full of tips, tricks and recipes to prepare healthy and tasty meals. The only change I had to make was to substitute the egg white. The author had suggested to use either whole wheat pastry flour or all purpose flour. I decided to go with the pastry flour and I’m so glad that I did it because the muffins came out so well; tasted excellent, had a wonderful texture and was very satisfying.

Oat flour is a new addition to my pantry and I’m using it quite often these days. It’s nothing but finely powdered oats. You can prepare it yourself using quick cooking oats and a food processor. I also noticed that cookies baked with oat flour is not as dense as the ones baked with whole wheat flour. I recently baked fat free chocolate chip cookies using part all purpose flour and part oat flour and I didn’t feel any difference at all taste-wise. Though the cookies were not the exact replica texture-wise because I had used unsweetened applesauce instead of butter. It felt more like a muffin/cake than a cookie. I’m still working to perfect a low fat chocolate chip cookie recipe. Until then here’s a recipe for cranberry muffins using oat flour. The original recipe is from Better Homes and Gardens’ Off the Shelf Baking. I have made a couple of changes to make it egg free and healthy.