owling's Full Review: Miracle Muffins: Amazingly Delicious Treats Withou...
I'm back with yet another muffin cookbook review. What is this now? Six? Seven? Something ridiculous like that. What can I say? We love muffins. We find they're the key to having a low-fat low-calorie yet satisfying breakfast that we can fix in five minutes. Freeze a batch of muffins, and you can toast them to yummy perfection at a moment's notice.
But of course we also love variety. So we're always looking for new and interesting muffin cookbooks.
Miracle Muffins is a solidly good muffin cookbook. The recipes are simple and easy, just one short page each with a clear, clean layout. They never trail onto the back of the page. There are no photos; this is a smallish paperback book. This also means it's a little more difficult to prop open than large, hardback cookbooks, but a cookbook shield from King Arthur Flour (http://www.kingarthurflour.com/) will fix that problem.
These are meant to be low-fat, and use buttermilk, 2% milk, and things like part-skim ricotta cheese and canola oil to make them healthy. The problem is that they then need butter in order to taste good. Note that I'm not normally a butter-with-muffins sort of person. I like my muffins sweet and plain. But these muffins definitely lack something if you don't put butter on them - every single recipe we've made so far. We sort of solve the problem by using Smart Balance spread - it's the only healthy butter substitute we've found so far that actually looks and tastes like real butter to us (no matter what the other brands' ads say).
There are some fantastic recipes in here, though. There's a raspberry muffin with a ginger streusel topping, for instance. Sweet and delicious, although because of the hunks of raspberry it doesn't reheat as well as other frozen muffins, so these are best eaten fresh. The blueberry muffins and the sugar plum muffins are similarly wonderful, but freeze and reheat well. If you can get your hands on maple sugar, it goes better over the top of the sugar plum muffins than the recommended granulated sugar (that too can be ordered from King Arthur Flour).
There's a Corn and Pepper Jack Cheese Muffin that beautifully blends the sweetness of corn kernels with the salty, spicy wonderfulness of pepper jack cheese. Fantastic!
The Chapters and a Few Recipes
Muffins with Coffee Cake Appeal:
Molasses-Oatmeal Muffins
Maple Bar Muffins
Sesame and Honey Almond Muffins...
Breakfast Breads and Coffee Cake:
Cherry Orange Loaves
Fresh Peach Lime Bread
Caribbean Yam and Coconut Bread...
Hotcakes and Waffles:
German Apple Pancakes
Chocolate Chip Banana Hotcakes
Belgian Hazelnut Waffles...
Syrups, Toppings, and Spreads:
Cinnamon Syrup
Apple Raisin Butter
Cranberry Orange Cream Cheese...
As you can see, there are some unusual and inventive flavor combinations here. There's also a surprising number of recipes for such a small-looking cookbook. It has 137 pages plus a thorough index. It also gives nutrition information for each recipe! So while this isn't the perfect muffin cookbook, it certainly deserves a place on your cookbook shelves.
Now muffin-lovers can enjoy these treats without guilt. The muffins featured in these recipes contain about two-thirds as many calories as regular one...More at Alibris
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