Gingerbread Muffins, the whole wheat way

I found a wonderful muffin cookbook at the Thompson Lane Library several years ago and checked it out several times. In fact, if you check it out now, one of the topping recipes is slightly difficult to read thanks to an unfortunate incident in my kitchen. Sorry. Now that I’ve gone whole wheat, I wanted to check it out again to see if I could modify some of the recipes for our new diet plan. Good news: it works! I served these twice this week, tweaking the recipe the second time to get the results I wanted. Here’s my adaptation of The Ultimate Muffin Book’s Gingerbread Muffin. The authors, Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarborough, strongly suggest using fresh spices, and they are right. If your Granny gave you her rusted can of McCormick’s Ginger from the Carter era, it’s just not going to cut it. Do yourself a favor and run down to Whole Foods where you can buy as much or little of their bulk spices as you want. It’s cheaper and you can control the quantity so you don’t have your own rusty can of turmeric to pass down to your grandchildren some day. Believe me, they’ll thank you later. These will be great for breakfast tomorrow before all those soccer or baseball games you all have to go to on Saturdays.

GINGERBREAD MUFFINS

3 cups freshly ground (soft wheat berry) flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

2 teaspoons ground ginger

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

1/8 teaspoon black pepper

2 large eggs

1/2 cup sucanat

1 cup buttermilk, or 1 cup milk with 1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar added

1/2 cup canola or coconut oil

1/3 cup unsulfured molasses (I used sorghum because I had it in the pantry)

1 teaspoon black strap molasses

1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 400. Grease muffin tin or use those paper liners. Mix first  7 ingredients, flour through pepper in a medium bowl and set aside. I did this the night before to speed up breakfast prep.

Beat eggs and sucanat for a couple of minutes until sucanat is mostly dissolved. Add buttermilk, oil, molasses, sorghum, and vanilla until thoroughly combined. Add dry ingredients and stir only until mixed. Fill 12  muffin cups. Mine were full to the top of the paper liner, but this made nice, tall muffins. Bake for 17-22 minutes. Mine were done in 17 but the recipe said 22. A toothpick came out clean except for one or two crumbs. Cool on a rack. While they cool, mix up this icing. The book calls it Vanilla Dip. I increased the amounts of everything and added a good bit more powdered sugar, cause my kids like their icing thick, not a glaze. Here’s my adaptation:

Vanilla Dip

3 Tbl water

1 Tbl light corn syrup

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 tsp vanilla

2 cups powdered sugar

Stir water, corn syrup, and salt in small saucepan until salt dissolves. Bring to simmer over medium heat, then immediately remove from stove and add vanilla.. Add powdered sugar 1/4 cup at at time, until you reach desired thickness. If it seems too warm when you take a lick, let it cool 5 minutes before you ice the muffins. It starts to set after you ice the muffins, but I don’t know how hard it gets, because no one would volunteer to use their muffin in the experiment. Sorry about that:).