Brown Sugar Cinnamon Apple Muffins

I felt like making muffins.  This urge comes on quite often and I ended up making a mess in my kitchen looking for ingredients that will make a great muffin.  Sometimes I find things that are amazing, other times I find things that make awful muffins.  One year I made blueberry muffins and tried to top them with a lime glaze.  Turns out lime glaze and and blueberry muffins take like industrial cleaner; therefore, not a successful muffin.  These however were incredibly successful muffins.  Left over apples, brown sugar, cinnamon, homemade buttermilk and some wheat pastry flour made these muffins slightly healthier than the average muffin.  Not to mention that these muffins make your house smell AMAZING!  Think the perfect combination of brown sugar, apples, and cinnamon.... yummmm!!!

So I made a few changes to this recipe, nothing major.  I never actually keep buttermilk on hand, so I normally have to make my own.  I make my buttermilk by using 2% or whole milk (1% will work, but it's not as thick).  In order to make a cup of buttermilk, I pour the milk into a glass measuring cup just to the very bottom of the one cup line.  Then, I add 1.5 tablespoons of white vinegar to the milk and let it sit.  In about 10 or 15 minutes, the milk will start to get kind of thick and slightly lumpy.  This is the buttermilk to use. I also used whole wheat pastry flour instead of whole wheat flour.  Here is the original recipe from King Arthur Flour.

The inside of this delicious muffin

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 3/4 cup brown sugar, divided
• 1 large egg
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 cup (4 ounces) whole wheat pastry flour
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 2 cups peeled, cored, and chopped apples; about 2 large apples, about 3/4 pound whole apples

Directions

1) Preheat the oven to 375°F. Grease and flour a 12-cup muffin pan, or line with papers and grease the insides of the papers.

2) Mix together the butter, granulated sugar, and 1/4 cup of the brown sugar, beating until fluffy.

3) Add the egg and mix well

4) Gently mix in the buttermilk.

5) Stir in the flours, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.

6) Fold in the chopped apples.

7) Divide the batter evenly among the prepared muffin cups, sprinkling the remaining 1/2 cup brown sugar on top.

8) Bake the muffins for 25 to 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean.

9) Remove the muffins from the oven, cool them for 5 minutes in the pan, then turn them out onto a rack to finish cooling completely.

Yield: 12 muffins.