How To: Lighten - Caramel Apple Muffins

One of the food blogs you must follow is How To: Simplify. It's a superb site and the blogger provides lots of great tips on how to improve your cooking skills and pairs them with wonderful recipes and gorgeous food photography. My favorite recipes to make from this blog are the Corn & Zucchini Salad, Pasta Salad and the Taco Soup. Recently, she posted a recipe for Caramel Apple Muffins along with a tutorial on the best ways to get muffins out of a muffin tin. I just had to try these muffins.

So about a week ago I made these. At first I thought, wow these have a lot of sugar in them. I took down the 3/4 cup of sugar the recipe called for to 1/2 cup but made no other changes (except to switch out regular Milk for Almond Milk). The muffins were absolutely delicious but I was a little bothered by how high in sugar and fat they were. They batter contained sugar, butter and chopped caramels and the topping contained brown sugar and butter. The topping, since it was so heavy with sugar, pretty much melted right off the top which defeated the purpose. So I asked myself, could I make these with less sugar and less fat but retain all the deliciousness?

Today I tried making these again with some key adjustments:

1/4 cup butter was replaced with 1/4 cup of extra light olive oil
12 chopped caramels went down to 6 caramels
I still kept Almond Milk in place of regular milk
3/4 cup of granulated sugar went down to 1/4 cup
I removed the brown sugar and butter from the topping and used extra light olive oil instead

And here is the result...

Ingredients:

2 cups of flour
1/4 cup of sugar
1 tablespoon of baking powder
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg
1 teaspoon of salt
1 egg
1 cup of Unsweetened Regular Almond Milk
1/4 cup of extra light olive oil
1-1/2 teaspoon of vanilla
1 Granny Smith apple, peeled and chopped
6 caramels chopped

1/4 cup of oats
1 tablespoon of extra light olive oil

This makes a dozen muffins.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Mix all the dry ingredients into a bowl then add the egg, milk, olive oil and vanilla. Mix until all those ingredients are thoroughly incorporated into the batter. Fold in the chopped apple and caramels.

Take a muffin tin and spray with baking spray. Evenly distribute the batter among the 12 cups. In a small bowl, mix the oats and the tablespoon of extra light olive oil. Distribute the topping evenly over the 12 muffins.

Bake for 20-25 minutes. Let rest for a bit and remove from tin.

These muffins came out a little sturdier than the original. They have more bite and less crumble. You can taste the tart of the apple better. They hold together better too. The oatmeal topping comes off a bit so many next time I would add just a teeny bit of brown sugar to the mix to help it stick. Otherwise, delicious! Enjoy.