Better living through chemistry.
These are cake-like muffins, quite moist, and will not dry out as fast as more traditional muffins. They are very tender and delicate.
I guess this is more interesting for what it DOESN'T have in it, as much as for what it does. No saturated fat! No trans-fat! No cholesterol (though dietary cholesterol is not the only source thereof in the bloodstream--in fact you could eat no cholesterol and have a high cholesterol level).
Usually to make a cake-like batter, you "cream" a saturated fat and sugar. Oil normally won't work; it has to be saturated, and typically saturated fats are hydrogenated oils, which creates trans-fats which are even worse, because our lipo-protein receptors (which I, personally, apparently don't have enough of!!) were not designed to deal with trans-fats.
I am guessing that the reason this recipe works, is that there is probably some natural soy lecithin in the soymilk out of which the soy yoghurt is made. Lecithin is an emulsifier, which breaks the surface tension between the oil and the water in the batter, and keeps them mixed just like in a "creamed" saturated fat version. The batter looks just like old-fashioned cake batter
Now, I made up this recipe by adapting a recipe for carrot-cake muffins, and reducing the sugar. It then made only 11 muffins, so I had to increase proportions slightly. I think this is correct but it might need to be tweaked a little more.
I would like to try all sorts of variations, but haven't had time to work them out. Zucchini muffins didn't quite work, because the Zucchinis have too much water in them. I will try less Zucchini and more flour to compensate.
RECIPE:
Preheat oven to 350F.
Prepare muffin tins. I lined mine with silicone liners and sprayed the bottoms with non-stick spray. Make sure you can get them out as they will be exceedingly tender and slightly sticky from the carmelized banana-sugar.
Beat this together:
?1/2 cup soy yoghurt
1/4 cup sugar (I use turbinado for the flavor)
1/3 cup oil (I used mixture of canola and flax seed)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp butter flavoring
1/4 tsp sea salt
Sift in mixed dried ingredients, in 2 or 3 batches, and beat until smooth:
3/4 cup flour. I used unbleached pastry flour, but all-purpose should work. I would guess that whole-wheat pastry flour would work too, since we're not trying to form any gluten anyway.
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp nutmeg
?optional: 3/4 tsp soy protein powder (to boost the protein of the flour a little--serves no culinary purpose). This is a fairly inexpensive ingredient I buy from trader joes that is vitamin-enriched
You don't have to beat vigorously, and it mixes pretty fast, actually.
Mix in this:
1 very ripe banana, mashed
1/4 cup chopped walnuts or, better, pecans
Fill each cup 2/3 full of batter. Don't overfill as this batter is fairly delicate, lacking any eggs or much leavening.
Bake approximately 26 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.
Now this is important: let the muffins cool before handling them, or they will COLLAPSE. I use silicone muffin/cupcake liners, sprayed with non-stick spray, and pull those out of the muffin tin but leave the muffins in the liners until fairly cool.
I use a lot of soy powder. The reason is because it keeps well (it is defatted), and it is high in lysine so that it balances the unbalanced protein in wheat. I typically use about a teaspoon per cup of wheat flour. I just checked the label and it is indeed vitamin-fortified. Just a little so it's not like we'll OD on anything. Note I said POWDER not FLOUR--this is soy protein isolate; it doesn't go rancid, and it doesn't contain significant amounts of phytoestrogens, the hysteria over which has been completely overblown (other commonly eaten legumes contain even more phytoestrogens, which seem to be mostly broken down anyway, plus they have roughly 1/1000th the activity of real estrogen).
The flax-seed oil and the nuts are rich in essential fatty acids, which are useful to humans for building hormones. Good for growing children...including babies! The vitamins in the soy powder are a good way to sneak vitamins into my wife, who otherwise "forgets" to take hers.
I will keep working on this one, because it is pretty good (it was a huge hit with my family), and I could probably tweak it more with some whole wheat pastry flour.
