Apple & Pear Oatmeal Muffins

I'm not really a fan of desserts. At a restaurant I would choose a starter and a main over main and dessert any day. If I had to go for dessert, I would be at the cheese board. I even crave savoury foods rather than sweet foods when I'm feeling peckish. 

I love fruit and I was getting bored of my usual slice of toast with butter and Marmite for breakfast before work. Even cereal was getting pretty boring. So I decided to make some low-fat Apple and Pear oatmeal breakfast muffins. These muffins have just the right amount of sweetness from the fruit and brown sugar but still retain a yummy brown, nutty flavour achieved by using brown flour, the oats and the walnuts. They are also surprisingly moist which makes them perfect for grabbing on the way out of the door to catch my train. 

I didn't want to be stingy with my muffins- I wasn't aiming for cupcakes, I wanted proper American style muffins you get in Starbucks. So I filled my muffin cases to the top. The weight of the contents meant they didn't rise as much as I would have hoped but the final product had a nice round top to them that you wouldn't achieve without slightly over-filing the cases.

The cases themselves are these greaseproof paper cases from If You Care, but I got them from Abel & Cole.  They fit nice and snug in my 12-hole Yorkshire pudding muffin tray. The boxes say that you don't need to grease them, yay, and they are microwavable too which is great.  They're perfect for muffins though as the muffin mix doesn't get caught on the paper, so when you go to remove them they're clean. 

The box also says that you can use the cases without a muffin tray. I was sceptical of this, maybe it would work on a lighter muffin but mine were heavy muffins. Anyways I had some mixture leftover after I filled the 12-hole tray so I had to have two muffins sitting without a try. The results are below:

Yeah, I guess technically they work, the muffins were cooked and didn't splurge all over the bottom of my oven. But it's not exactly the best looking muffin compared to the one above is it?

 Ingredients
dry
2 cups Oats
1 1/4 cups self-raising brown Flour
1/2 brown Sugar
3/4 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Cinnamon

wet
1 cup Milk
2 tbsp Oil
2 Egg whites, whisked
4 small shredded eating Apples

2 small shredded Pears

1/2 cup Walnuts, chopped

Recipe
You need two bowls, one to mix the wet ingredients (larger bowl) and one to mix the dry ingredients. Then you need to combine the dry into the wet and stir. I don't have two bowls, so I did everything in one big bowl in this order:

Pre-heat oven to ~160 degrees (fan assisted, or 180 degrees no fan)

Whisk 2 egg whites (can use 1 whole egg, but I chose this low fat alternative) until frothy. Add milk (can use buttermilk if you want to be indulgent) and oil (or melted butter) and mix. Drain excess liquid from shredded fruit, then add to bowl. Mix again.

Sieve flour into bowl (with brown flour the 'brown' bits tend to stay at the end of sieve, so if you have brown bits left just shove those in), the purpose of sieving the flour is to make the texture feel a bit lighter. Add Sugar, Salt, Cinnamon and oats. Combine with a wooden spoon until flour is wet. Add chopped walnuts.

Spoon mixture into muffin cases/greased muffin tray. Sprinkle some brown sugar over the top. Put in oven for 25 minutes or until cooked. Test for done-ness by poking a BBQ stick into the centre of one of the muffins- if it comes out with wet mixture, put it in for a bit longer.