Crunchy top apple and pear muffins
Cookbook Challenge: Week 40
Theme: Apple
Recipe: “Crunchy top” apple & pear muffins
From: Bill Granger’s Holiday
You know when you’ve been baking for a while, you start to get the jist of recipes. Most baked goods follow a similar method – for example, with many cakes you cream the butter and sugar first, and then add the dry and wet ingredients separately in a couple of batches. With muffins, you mix together the dry ingredients and then stir through the wet ingredients. After a while, once you’ve sussed out the necessary quantities of the different ingredients, you don’t really need to read the recipe.
Well, that’s my excuse for following this recipe. It’s apple week for the Cookbook Challenge, and I made “crunchy top” apple muffins. You might be wondering why they’re “crunchy top” muffins, and why they just look like normal muffins in the photo. It’s because I failed to read the recipe properly when baking them. Surprise!
The muffins are adapted from a Bill Granger recipe – his were plain pear muffins, but I made them apple and pear muffins. Plus his version only had one piddly pear in the mix, but if I’m having a fruit muffin I want FRUIT. So I threw in two apples and a pear (yep, I’m still working my way through my pears). Oh yeah, and I was supposed to set aside some of the sugar and sprinkle it on top of the muffin mixture with chopped pecans before baking – which would have given the muffins the crunchy top. I just threw everything in all together. Recipe reading fail. Whoops!
The muffins have a mixture of plain and wholemeal flours, plus rolled oats. Wholemeal flour + rolled oats + fruit = healthy. Right?? Healthy or not, they’re rather nice muffins. I loved the nuttiness from the oats, the cinnamon, and particularly all the chunks of fruit.
I think I’ll make them again. But whether I’ll read the recipe properly next time – that I can’t confirm!
See previous Cookbook Challenge posts here.
Crunchy top apple and pear muffins
Adapted from Bill Granger’s Holiday
Makes 6
125g plain flour, sifted
60g wholemeal plain flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
100g rolled oats
140g brown sugar (set aside 1/4 cup of sugar)
2 eggs
250ml plain low-fat yoghurt
125ml vegetable oil
2 apples, peeled and diced
1 pear, peeled and diced
40g pecan nuts, finely chopped
Preheat the oven to 180°C. Line six 1 cup muffin holes with paper cases.
In a large bowl, stir the dry ingredients together – the flours, baking powder, cinnamon and oats. Stir in 1/2 cup of the sugar (and set the other 1/4 cup aside).
Whisk together the wet ingredients in a bowl – eggs, yoghurt and oil. Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients. Pour the wet ingredients into the well and mix together until just combined. Fold through the apples and pears.
Spoon in the prepared muffin cases.
Make a crumble topping by mixing together the pecans with the remaining sugar. Sprinkle over the muffin mixture and bake for about 20-25 minutes until golden brown.
August 20, 2010 @ 12:22 pm
BFF! I have everything I need in the pantry to make these, hurrah! (I still have a slightly weird pantry. Chocolate chip cookie dough peanut butter and disgusting banana-flavoured marshmallows, for example, but no bicarb, cornstarch, or butter-type product.)
I love rolled oats and muffins and faux-healthiness and fruit. And I think you’d give me the thumbs-up on a certain dinner guest I had over last night, who brought cake that he’d made to which he’d added lychees and peaches to the sour cherries of the original recipe 🙂 Fruit fruit fruit!
August 20, 2010 @ 12:40 pm
YOU NEED TO EMAIL ME, STAT. 😉
August 20, 2010 @ 3:17 pm
Week 40! Babe, you are almost there 🙂
August 20, 2010 @ 6:50 pm
Haha, I got really confident once and only half followed a recipe then wondered why I had an ingredient left over at the end!
Not to worry, these muffins look great anyway. Apple or pear (or a combination of both) paired with cinnamon is always a great marriage.
August 21, 2010 @ 7:57 pm
This has been on my list of things to make for YONKS! you make it look so damn delicious!
August 23, 2010 @ 12:34 am
Good on you for the added fruit. I hate muffin fruit stinginess! I won’t mention what I think of crunchy top stinginess 😉
August 23, 2010 @ 9:50 pm
In my defence, Conor, it wasn’t crunchy top stinginess… just terrible recipe reading skills. 😉
August 25, 2010 @ 11:12 am
They look so cute and yummy! I love fruity muffins, and also how you did them in a mini loaf tin! Can’t wait to give it a go… another trip to the kitchen shop!
August 26, 2010 @ 9:31 pm
With or without the crunchy top these look delicious. Not a huge fan of muffins, but would definitely give these a go. Thanks Agnes!
August 27, 2010 @ 2:24 pm
They look great! I love the mini loaf tin look!
September 12, 2010 @ 1:09 am
It may not have been true to the recipe, but they still look great and I want one!
June 16, 2014 @ 3:35 pm
Thanks for the recipe! Baked these on the weekend and they turned out great – I have a sweet tooth and think they could be a touch sweeter, but they’re pretty tasty so I wouldn’t fiddle with the sugar qty in future. I agree with your call on the fruit – I used both apple and pear. I also added ground cloves, nutmeg and cardamom to the mixture, as well as chopped walnuts and pecans. Yum 🙂