A Cooking Teens Original

With five minutes to go before the school bus is due, your well-meaning attempts at breakfast can quickly deteriorate from a homemade nutrition-fest to packaged-weird-sweet-pastry-thing-in-the-toaster (where it morphs into toasted-weird-sweet-pastry-thing, which you gobble down while running out the door, only to crash a couple of hours later in math class when your body is craving some real nutrients).

But with just a teeny bit of baking wizardry on the weekend, after school or in the evening, you (and your family) can enjoy a luscious, nutritious, yummy muffin in the morning in the same time it takes for the toaster to work its magic on that pouchy “pastry.” The key to success here is to make a bunch of muffins at once, then to toss them in the freezer and use later as needed – for breakfast, with lunch or for a delicious (and, as it happens, nutritious) snack.

Family-Friendly Pumpkin Muffins

Ingredients

Dry:

3 3/4 cups white flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 1/2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons cloves
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup mixture of small, dried fruits such as mixed raisins, dried blueberries, dried cranberries, etc.
1 cup walnuts or pecans, chopped

Wet:

1 can plain pumpkin (29 ounces)
1 cup of unsweetened applesauce
6 eggs

To Prepare:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spritz three 12-cup muffin tins with cooking spray, or grease each cup with a teeny bit of butter.

In a large bowl, combine the first eight dry ingredients (flour through salt) and mix well with a fork. In a second bowl, combine the wet ingredients and mix well with a fork. Add the wet ingredients to the bowl with the dry ones, then add the chocolate chips, dried fruit and nuts. Combine thoroughly and spoon batter into muffin tins. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until toothpick inserted in a muffin comes out clean. (Try to avoid stabbing the chocolate chips with a toothpick or it might be hard to determine whether or not the muffins are cooked.)

When the muffins are done, remove them from the tins and let them cool on a rack or a plate. Once cool, wrap the muffins singly or in pairs in plastic wrap, then toss the wrapped muffins into a couple of freezer bags and put the bags in the freezer. When you plan to eat the muffins, either take them out the night before and let them thaw on a plate, or, if you don’t plan that far ahead, take them out of the freezer when you need them, remove the plastic wrap, and heat them in the microwave for a minute or two – or about the time it takes for the pouchy pocket to pop up out of the toaster and morph into a pastry.

By Carol Leonetti Dannhauser

© Rising Moon Media, 2008