The Last Exile

Anyone who knows me knows I am not much for breakfast and once the tribe started sleeping in till all hours of the day I figured my days of being slaved to their breakfasts were over. From here on in – it was up to them to make themselves something to eat. I would keep the fixings for a variety of different breakfasts but kitchen labour was strictly their own.

Now that the Last Amazon has come home from university I wanted to do something nice for them. I love having my children all under one roof and under foot. I thought nothing could be better than waking up and smelling comfort food so yesterday I made fresh potato latkes with apple sauce and sour cream. I tried out a baked rather than fired version. Enough said; except there’s no point in ruining a perfectly good fried comfort food by baking it.

This morning I decided to repeat my adventures in breakfasts and decided on muffins because I have a real surplus of whole wheat flour that I need to start using up. All I had to do was figure out what kind of muffins as all the fruit had been eaten up in the last week but I did find carrots. I didn’t have a recipe for carrot muffins and I suppose I could have looked one up on the internet but what kind of a cook would I be if I needed to up every thing on the net before I cooked? My house smells absolutely wonderful with cinnamon and nutmeg. And the muffins – well Isaiah Sender was the first to succumb to the smell and rise. He’s eaten three so far with no end in sight. Since I made up the recipe on the fly I should add this caveat — I started out with 1 ½ cups of yogurt and found it needed more and my nutmeg is freshly ground.

2 ½ cups of whole wheat flour
1 ½ cups of all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons of baking powder
3 teaspoons of cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons of nutmeg
4 eggs
1 cup of brown sugar
2 tablespoons of maple syrup
1 ½ cups of shredded carrots
¼ cup of oil
2 cups of vanilla yogurt
1 teaspoon of salt

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

In a bowl, mix flour, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt well. Set aside. In another bowl, beat the eggs till frothy. Then add the oil, brown sugar and maple syrup and stir well. Gradually add in the yogurt, mix and then the shredded carrots. Mix well. Then very gently add in liquid mixture to the flour mixture. You do not want to over mix the flour mixture but if you find its a little dry – add a touch of yogurt into the mix – about a tablespoon at a time. Place in greased muffin pans (I prefer to spray my tins) and cook for approximately 15-17 minutes or until a knife comes out smooth. I put batter 2/3rd of the muffin tin with batter and found I had 18 muffins.

If you want to improve on this recipe try adding about ½ cup of coarsely crushed pecan nuts to eggs/sugar mixture.