After  a morning run, I love to spend my weekend whipping up some muffins.  I try to pick recipes that are a little different but don’t involve buying lots of extra ingredients, with an emphasis on things that are good to freeze and warm up over the following weeks.

Today’s muffins were inspired by my favorite fruit, granny smith apples.  I know people usually use softer apples for baking, but granny smiths work just fine and are a healthy snack if you don’t get around to baking.  The ginger in this recipe gives you a final product that’s tasty but not traditional.

Apple-Cinnamon- Ginger Muffins

Ingredients:

• 1 1/4 cups quick oats (or rolled oats, just run them through a blender quickly to chop them down to size)
• 1 cup milk
• 1/2 cup sugar*
• 1 tsp vanilla*
• 3 tbsp vegetable oil
• 3 tbsp honey
• 1 tsp ginger, fresh, peeled, and grated (buy a jar and save yourself a ton of time – and it lasts forever!)
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 egg
• 1 1/4 cup flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 large apple, peeled and cut into small cubes

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Lightly grease muffin cups (I used one regular sized pan and one mini-muffin pan).
2. Mix together the first nine ingredients (oats through egg) in a large bowl.
3. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking soda, and salt.
4. Make a well in the middle of the flour mix (just push the flour to the side so there’s a mini-crater in the middle, essentially).  Pour the oat mixture into the flour mixture, and mix together lightly until all ingredients are wet.
5. Fold in apples, taking care not to overmix.  Batter will be a bit soupy, perfect for putting into muffin cups.
6. Put the mix in the muffin cups – mine made 9 normal sized muffins and 12 mini-muffins.
7. Bake for 10 minutes for mini-muffins, 15 minutes for normal muffins. When the muffin tops spring back when touched, they’re done!  Remove from the pans and let cool before freezing.

Eat, freeze, share, hoard… however you plan to consume them, enjoy!

These muffins are not so sweet that you couldn’t serve them with a meal, though I’m looking forward to eating these for breakfast.

*I modified this recipe from what I was planning to use to account for the fact that my brown sugar had solidified into a brick, but you could also replace the sugar and vanilla with 1/2 cup of brown sugar for a different taste.