Basic Muffin Method with Carrot Muffins

Hi I'm Judith Kingsbury from Savvy Vegetarian.com Welcome to my kitchen! Today I'm going to make carrot muffins but first I want to talk about "The Muffin Method." Which is something I learned way way back in high school in Home Ec class. First the wet ingredients and dry ingredients should be roughly equal in volume, most of the time for twelve good sized medium muffins you need about two and a half cups of dry ingredients and two and a half cups of wet ingredients. How you balance out the wet and dry ingredients, that's the creative part. For instance in these muffins, I'm using two cups of all purpose gluten-free flour mix. And you can use any combination of flours that you want. Then I have half a cup of chopped walnuts, so that's two and a half cups of dry ingredients right there. Salt, cinnamon, baking powder, and baking soda adds another couple tablespoons. Then I have a quarter cup of water mixed with a tablespoon of ground flax seed and psyllium powder, plus a cup of thick applesauce. Three quarters of a cup of almond milk, a quarter cup of oil. Plus two tablespoons of lemon juice. So that's approximately equal to the amount of dry ingredients. Then I have also a cup of grated carrots and three quarters of a cup of raisins and a quarter cup of sugar and those don't add a lot to either the wet or dry ingredients so they're just considered extras. I have a twelve cup medium muffin tin, you can either oil it or you can use paper muffin cup liners. First with mixing up the wet ingredients, I'm going to add almond milk and mix that up well. you can do this in a blender or a food processor. Put in the oil and the lemon juice. You only need lemon juice if you're making a vegan version of this muffin because it reacts with the baking soda and the baking powder to help things rise a little better. I'm going to put in the sugar, stir it up and add the applesauce, stir that in, add the raisins, they'll plump up in the liquid. We are going to let this sit for a few minutes while we mix the dry ingredients. Stir the carrots in, throw in the chopped walnuts, stir those in, a teaspoon of vanilla. I'm just going to add about twenty drops of liquid stevia. If you want to leave out the sugar you can double the amount of stevia, use forty or fifty drops. Stir that in, ok that looks good. To mix these muffins, I'm going to use a large bowl, then I'm going to add the dry ingredients to that. A teaspoon of baking soda, a tablespoon of baking powder, two teaspoons of cinnamon, half a teaspoon of salt. Now normally I would add xanthan gum to gluten-free flour mix. The psyllium powder that is a xanthan gum substitute. Mix the wet into the dry ingredients, mix quickly, folding the wet into the dry just until they're combined. I forgot to mention, of course, I always forget to mention something, before I started mixing the muffins up I had my oven turned on and preheating to 375 degrees. Use a spoon to put the muffins in the cups, fill them right up to the top. These won't rise as much as muffins normally would because they are so full of stuff, so they are a little denser maybe than normal but they are absolutely delicious. There we go, now we're going to pop then in the oven and set the timer for twenty minutes. Depending on how hot your oven is they could take twenty-five minutes. It's been twenty minutes and the muffins look ready to come out. Yep, they are firm to the touch. If you are not using paper muffin liners, you can just let the muffins sit in the pan for 5 minutes and then the steam that they release will loosen them up and make it easy to get them out of the pan. Usually you can just turn the pan over and dump them out. Since I did use paper liners and they'll come out easily, they should cool for maybe 15 minutes before you eat them. Here is our lovely carrot muffins, they look very carrot cakey. These are delicious all by themselves without anything on them because there is so many goodies in them. Thank-you for joining me to make carrot muffins, I hope this has inspired you to get creative with muffin making. Enjoy your yummy muffins and I'll see you next time.