muffiny goodness

Oh man. Long time since the last update. Alas, that's what job hunting, writing academic papers and squeezing in a week at the beach can do to you.

Anywho, I wanted to talk about this crazy new idea I stumbled upon - using yogurt instead of oil in baked goods. Yes, we've all seen the back of the Duncan Hines package and you can use applesauce instead of oil, but I've been experimenting with yogurt. And I'm liking the results.

Things that yogurt does to (most) baked goods: increase in chewiness, moistness; decrease in saturated fat, cholesterol. I love the idea of better-for-you baked goods without oil, but some may ask, "what about the buttery goodness that we'll miss out on?" There's a solution: use a mix of yogurt and butter.

So how do you do it? For oil, I find that you can generally get away with subbing the same amount of oil. For butter however, A Taste of Home recommends that you subsititute half the butter with half as much yogurt. That means instead of using one cup of butter, you use 1/2 cup butter and 1/4 cup yogurt.

I was getting bored of having cereal, so I figured I'd bake something for breakfast this week that was healthy(-ish). I stumbled upon a muffin recipe that uses yogurt, but I made some tweaks to add a bit more nutrition. The recipe (with my changes) is:

1 cup all-purpose flour (unbleached)
1 cup whole-wheat flower
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 (8 ounce) container blueberry flavored
yogurt (I used Greek)
1 egg
2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon butter, melted
2 cups blueberries

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease 12 muffin cups or line with paper muffin liners.

2) Stir together flour, sugar, baking soda and baking powder. In a separate bowl, combine yogurt, egg, vanilla, butter and blueberries. Stir mixtures together just until combined; batter will be very thick. Taste batter to make sure it tastes delicious. Taste again, and realize that if you taste anymore you won't have enough batter. Scoop into prepared muffin cups.

3) Bake in preheated oven for 25 minutes.

I added a little bit of muesli on top of the muffins before I baked for some extra pizazz. You could also use some rolled oats and honey, or even some All-Bran cereal ( if you're irregular, heh heh).

Result: delicious. You can't even tell these muffins have barely any oil in them.