What's Cooking Wednesday: Apricot/Chocolate/Pecan Muffins

Please go to Shan's place for more What's Cooking Wednesday participants.

So I think Anno felt sorry for me. I've been having a rather rough time with some family issues lately and I was reading this post and pressing my nose up against her blog window like a dispossessed orphan.

I can be whiny like that.

But happily, she loves me anyway, and when Monday rolled around, it was the last day of classes at the place where we both teach, and her charming daughter, m, brought me a plate filled with the kind of Christmas baking I was whining that I had no time to do.

And it was a truly lovely plate, and if I'd had my act together I would have photographed it, but ... um... no such luck.

It had all sorts of goodies, but I was particularly struck by a bread that contained apricots and chocolate and nuts of some type. So, given that my whining had worked so far, I whined at her for the recipe. And she pointed me in this direction. She told me that actually, she was trying to reproduce a recipe that her mother made, and that she might get the real recipe this weekend, so maybe she'll have her own post on this combination.

She also said that the bread she'd made seemed very crumbly and that a full tablespoon of baking powder seemed like a lot.

I agreed. And as I looked at the ingredients and saw mounds of butter, etc., I decided that I was going to have to make major modifications on this one. And that muffins would be better, because if I'm going to splurge with these sorts of ingredients, a whole, big, lovely muffin is so much better than a little slice of a 12th of a loaf (and they're the same serving size in terms of recipe portion). So I got up this morning, and made these muffins, as per D's request from his sick bed, and also experimented with the "Food of the Gods" recipe. And yeah, it's pretty darned good.

Apricot/Chocolate/Pecan Muffins



Ingredients:

2 eggs
1 cup lowfat butter milk
1/2 cup orange juice
1/2 tsp rosewater (Marye has made me a big fan of rosewater in baking)
1 TBS canola oil - (take THAT 1/4 lb. butter!)
3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup oat bran
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup pecan pieces (the original recipe called for walnuts, but what I had was pecans)
1/2 cup bittersweet chocolate chips
1 heaping cup chopped dried apricots (these can most easily be chopped using a food processor if you have one)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 400
2. Beat eggs, stir in other wet ingredients.
3. Pour dry ingredients into the bowl, stir together (minus the "goodies")
4. Stir in pecans, chips and apricots
5. Spoon the batter into a greased muffin tin.
6. Bake for 20 minutes.
7. Let cool in pans for 5 minutes before removing muffins.

Post-mortem. I love Marye, but I think I'd use a TBS of Grand Marnier next time rather than the rose water, and if I'm really feeling ambitious, I'd zest in some orange rind. Other than that, these have gotten thumbs up from the fam.

Nutrition Info:

Fat: 6.4g
Carbohydrates: 27.4g
Calories:169.1
Protein: 4.1g

Nutritional info provided by www.sparkpeople.com.