Almond Orangenilla Muffins - a Mescipe!

I love to mess around with recipes...thus the term (that I just coined myself!) "Mescipes"! I just made some muffins that are pretty darn tasty, and even a smidgen better for you than regular muffins. The original recipe is from the Joy of Cooking, "Reduced-fat muffins". (I decided to start with this recipe simply because we'd run out of milk; making "reduced fat" means no milk, apparently.) I'll put that recipe in here, along with changes I made and why I made them.

REDUCED FAT MUFFINS turned into ALMOND ORANGENILLA MUFFINS

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grease or line muffin tin of 12 regular muffins.

Dry Ingredients:

Joy Of Cooking (JoC): 2 c. flour
Jessica Tryon (JT): 1 c. all-purpose flour + 1 c. almond flour that I made by grounding up almonds in my Cuisinart.
Why?: I've done this with other recipes and I know that it works, and almonds are tres good for you, and cuts down on the carbs from white flour. It does give it a texture though, and a little crunch, so if you don't like that in muffins stick with all-purpose white!

JoC: 1/2 - 2/3 c. sugar
JT: 1/3 c. regular white sugar and 1/3 c. Splenda, to cut down on the carbs.
Why?: Splenda's a pretty safe bet when baking, as far as sugar alternatives go; and though I can taste a Splenda flavour in other things I've done with it, I don't taste it in these muffins... yet.

JoC & JT: 4 t. baking powder - no change. I don't know enough about how this works to mess with it.

JoC & JT: 1/2 t. salt - no reason to change that one!

JoC: 1/4 t. baking soda (if using yogurt; don't use this if you're using milk!)
JT: 1/4 t. + 1/8 t. baking soda
Why?: I will be using yogurt. Also, the Joy of Cooking adds little extra recipes following a basic recipe to add flavours and things. Since I was going Orange, and it didn't have anything for orange, I followed tips under Lemon about adding the extra 1/8 t.

JoC: 1/4 t. nutmeg (optional) - I did not add the nutmeg, because I didn't want to!


Wet Ingredients:
JoC & JT: 1 large egg - didn't mess with the egg.

JoC: 3 T. veg oil or 3.5 T butter, melted
JT: 3.5 T. butter, melted
Why?: Obviously, using the oil instead of the butter will cut down on the fat. But I used the butter for flavor. Because butter is tasty. Plus, I smear some on when I eat them, too. I start thinking butter will be the death of me, but then I think of Paula Deen and stop worrying about it. :)

JoC: 1 t. vanilla extract
JoC: 1 t. orange juice
Why?: I intended to use yogurt instead of milk, but I only have vanilla yogurt! So I didn't add vanilla. However, I made orange muffins, so I squeezed half an orange and put in 1 t. of orange juice instead! This keeps the liquids balanced, which is important.

JoC: 1 c. lowfat milk or plain lowfat yogurt
JT: 1 c. Activia vanilla yogurt
Why?: It's what I had, but since we needed vanilla extract (see previous) that worked out great!

That's everything that the original recipe says to use. Mix the dry in one bowl, the wet in another, then pour the wet into the dry and stir it until -just- mixed up, then put them into muffin tins (made 12 regular muffins, kind of flat... not enough batter to puff over the top) and bake for "12 minutes (or slightly longer with fruit)".

However, I needed more orangeyness for my orange muffins. So:

To the dry mix I added: little pieces of oranges. I cut the orange so that I could section it like a grapefruit and cut each section into tiny bits. I squeezed them a bit by smooshing them with the flat of the knife. Then I dropped them carefully into the flour one at a time and coated them thoroughly. This keeps them from burning and sticking together in clumps.

To the wet mix I added: orange zest! I haven't got a zester, so I carefully peeled the orange with a veggie peeler (avoid the white bitter pith!) then chopped the peelings into teensy bits. The lemon recipe said to mix the lemon zest into the wet mix, so that's what I did with the orange zest.

Now that I've added little bits of oranges, I ended up not getting frantic when the timer went off, and these ended up having about 14 or 15 minutes. It was a smidge too much, the bottoms stuck; next time I'll definitely check them at 12 and make a wiser decision.


I know a lot of folks who freak out when it comes to not following a recipe perfectly. But I've found that in most cases, since recipes are really just a combination of elements creating chemical reactions, if you have similar ingredients (like orange instead of lemon) you can fudge it pretty easily. Use what you know from other recipes (like knowing that ground up almonds made good flour for cupcakes), or look up recipes that use your main ingredient and see what kinds of things they do with it. Most of that information, given a similar food type, will be interchangeable. Learning how to make Mescipes gives a lot more flexibility for creating great food when your ingredients may be unpredictable.

So what kind of Mescipe will you be whipping up next?