My day usually starts with a muffin or some pop tarts. Pancakes or bacon and eggs are great and all, but often I wake up not fully functional. Plus, I'm pretty sure the cereal in my cupboard is alive at this point.
So! Since eating a single pastry is generally neither healthy or filling, what is there to do? Well, apparently there's bran muffins.
Rather than being made from just the starch of a grain, they have plenty of bran, the fibrous coating of the grain, in them. It's apparently healthy, filling, and a great source of dietary fiber.
Unfortunately, it ALSO tends to be pretty dry, since bran is hard to get wet. Well, I'm not going to settle for dry muffins.
First off, we need the most important ingredient:
Bran. Traditionally, bran muffins are made with wheat bran, full of water insoluble fiber. Wheat bran, however, is bland and unappealing, so we're using oat bran instead. Much more soluble fiber than insoluble, tastes better, and easier to find.
But, then we run the risk of making a big oatmeal cookie, and oatmeal cookies are chocolate chip's grosser cousin. To avoid that, and to make a later step faster, I'm sticking it in the ol' spice grinder.
Why, you ask, do I call this a spice grinder when it is clearly a coffee grinder? Well, the coffee I prefer to drink comes in trays of bottles, and a good coffee grinder is a good spice grinder. As far as I'm concerned, most anything that advertises itself as a spice grinder is just a more expensive coffee grinder.
Now I've got two cups of oat bran ground up, and to that I'm adding an equal amount of buttermilk and two tablespoons of molasses. This is to avoid that whole 'dry muffin' thing; by soaking up this much liquid, it should stay nice and moist.
Next, the dry ingredients! A cup of sugar, two and a half cups whole wheat flour, two and a half teaspoons of baking powder (in retrospect, this part should have been baking soda. Oops!), a teaspoon of salt, and plenty of milk chocolate chips, stirred together well. Hey, it's still a muffin after all, it's not like we're making a salad. I fibbed about not using wheat bran, by the way; whole wheat flour generally has a healthy amount of wheat bran, and with this we get the best of both worlds.
After a while, the bran soaked up all the liquid and pretty much became oatmeal; this got tossed into the dry ingredients, along with two eggs and half a cup of oil.
Uh oh! I may have underestimated the dangers of substituting whole wheat flour for white. At a guess, the germ and bran soak up more water, just like the oat bran, threatening to turn the whole thing into dough.
At times like this, I remember the words of my father on the subject of pancake; if it's too thick, add more milk.
After emptying the rest of my carton (maybe a quarter of a cup?), adding plenty of regular whole milk, and another teaspoon and a half of baking powder, the dough turned back into a batter. At a guess, I'd say I added an extra cup of liquid.
Trayed. I had enough left for maybe a few more muffins, but like the bourgeois fuck I am, rather than having my butler have his butler have a third muffin pan airlifted to me, I tossed away the extra batter.
Sixteen minutes in a 350 degree oven later:
Despite my oopsie on the baking soda, these turned out pretty nice. Pleasantly sweet, moist, and a little chewy.
