Make sure you read that title closely. These aren’t any ordinary oat muffins. These are amazing little morals of oatmeal yumminess, complete with a crunchy-sweet topping. It’s the best bowl of oatmeal wrapped up in the form of a muffin!
Oatmeal Muffins
Oatmeal Muffins*
Ingredients:
Topping
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/3 cup whole wheat flour (or all-purpose)
1/3 cup chopped almonds
3 TB brown sugar
1 1/4 tsp cinnamon
4 TB of canola oil
Muffins:
2 TB ground flax seeds mixed with 6 TB of water
2 TB of Earth Balance butter
6 TB of Earth Balance butter, melted
2 cups of rolled oats
1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 3/4 cup non-dairy milk (soy or almond)
Directions:
1) For the topping, combine the oats, flour, almonds, sugar, and cinnamon. Drizzle the canola oil over the mixture and mix with either your hands or a fork until all the dry ingredients are moistened.
2) Grease a muffin tin, or line it with muffin liners. Mix the flax meal with the water, whisk with a fork, and then set aside.
3) Melt the first two TB of Earth Balance in a skillet over medium heat.Add oats and cook, stirring frequently until the oats start to turn golden brown (about 6-8 minutes).
4) Transfer the oats to a food processor and process into fine meal, about 30 seconds. Add flour, baking powder and baking soda to the food processor and pulse until combined, about 3 pulses.
5) Stir 6 TB of melted butter and sugar together in a large bowl until smooth. Add the milk and the flax-seed mixture and whisk until smooth. Then, here is where a cool “whisk folding” technique comes in. If you mix in the flour/oat mixture too much you will get gummy muffins. But if you don’t get all the dry ingredients mixed in you end up with pockets of dry flour. What to do? Cook’s Illustrated taught me about whisk folding here. Basically, you gently drag a whisk back and forth in the bowl, and then tap it on the edge of the bowl to mix in the rest of the batter. This tapping breaks up the dry flour pockets, but doesn’t over-mix the batter. So, add 1/2 of the dry ingredients into the wet and gently stir. Then, add the rest of the dry ingredients and use “whisk folding” until all the dry ingredients are moistened.
6) Set the batter aside for 20 minutes to let the oat soak up all the liquids. Preheat the oven to 375.
7) After the 20 minute rest time, use an ice cream scooper or large spoon to evenly distribute the batter to your 12 muffin cups. Spoon on the topping and press down very gently. Bake for 18-25 minutes, and check for doneness by seeing if a toothpick comes out of the muffins cleanly. When they are done baking put the muffins on a wire rack to cool for at least 10 minutes before serving.
*Veganized and adapted from Cook’s Illustrated (Number 120, Jan/Feb 2013)
