If there’s anything that screams autumn, it’s apple picking.
After last weekend’s failed attempt at visiting an orchard, yesterday was a successful afternoon of apple picking. My hubby and I journeyed to the town of Watsonville to check out Clearview Organic Orchards. Unfortunately we always seem to be a little late in the game when it comes to picking apples, and the trees were pretty picked over. We still found some good apples, and supplemented the rest of our bag with apples that had already been picked from the trees earlier.
When the guy at Clearview Orchards told me that he “robs” the bee hives every week to get the raw local honey that they sell, I knew I’d want to nab a jar for myself. I put honey on everything lately! You may have already noticed this with my recent recipes – including the one I’ll be talking about in a moment today. 🙂
They also had ginormous banana squash. I’ve never cooked with banana squash before, and would totally have gotten one to experiment with had we not taken my hubby’s motorcycle to the orchards. I was already worried about the heaviness of a backpack full of apples on the ride home – let alone with one of these babies added to the mix!
What we did come home with was the honey, a butternut squash, and quite a bunch of Fuji and Granny Smith apples. Adam and I both love apples, and I have no doubts that we’ll easily eat em all. 
Upon coming home with 10 pounds of apples, I couldn’t contain my foodie excitement and got right down to making a couple of recipes with them. Today I’m sharing this one with you:
I got the idea to make apple raisin muffins from Jazzy Vegetarian Classics, a cookbook I mentioned last week that I was recently sent to review. More on that at a later date, but its healthy apple muffins sounded like a great idea to me. I made some modifications to the cookbook’s original recipe, including subbing maple syrup for some of my new honey, adding ground flaxseed to the mix, nixing pumpkin seeds and changing a few of the ingredient amounts.
Do any other bakers out there find that muffin recipes tend to underestimate the amount of servings that it will make? Even though I changed some things up from the original recipe, it should have still made the same amount of muffins. The cookbook says the recipe will make 6 muffins, and I wound up filling 12 cups with muffin batter! I wonder if there are giant muffin tins out there that everyone’s using, or if my muffin tin is mini sized and I just don’t know it…. Anyways, having 12 now 10 of these around this week is fine by me!
I love how clean and healthy these muffins are. They turned out subtly sweet, making them good for any time of day: as part of breakfast or lunch, or as a snack or dessert. I ate them plain today, but have a hunch that they’d be awesome toasted with a touch of butter or with some TJ’s pumpkin cream cheese spread.
I was in love with this spread last year and couldn’t resist buying it last week. Fall = pumpkin obsession for everyone and their mother, including me. And now, here’s the recipe:
Honey Apple Raisin Muffins
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
- 1/2 cup raisins
- 5 small apples I used Fuji
- 1/3 cup honey
- 1/4 cup ground flaxseed meal
- 1/2 cup almond milk plus more as needed
- 1/2 TBSP freshly squeezed lemon juice
- Zest from 1/2 small lemon
- 2 TSP baking powder
- 1 TSP ground cinnamon
- 1/8 TSP sea salt
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 375. Line a 12-cup muffin tin with muffin cups.
- Peel, core, and roughly chop the apples. Puree them by placing in a food processor and blending until the consistency of apple sauce is achieved (Don't completely liquefy).
- In a large bowl, place flour, flaxseed, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt, and stir to combine.
- Add the raisins and apple puree, and mix with a wooden spoon to combine.
- Stir in the lemon juice, zest, honey, and almond milk, and mix just until incorporated. The batter should be thick, but if it seems overly dry, you can stir in more almond milk until the mixture is moist.
- Spoon the batter into the muffin cups. Bake until golden and a tooth pick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean, around 30 minutes.
- Place muffins on a wire rack to cool before enjoying.
Oh man! I feel ya on the picked over trees! So disappointing but your muffins look so yummy! I’m looking forward to your review! Also, I have never heard of banana squash before!
Oh okay so I’m not the only one whose never had banana squash before! Yeaaa we were both late in the game. There’s always next year though!
Yum! Apples are my favorite fruit!!
I love apples too!!
Wow, banana squash looks crazy- glad you did not carry it on your back! lol Muffins look fantastic and you look beautiful as always 🙂
I know right — That big guy was like half of my body weight! Thanks mom!