Whole Wheat Apple Muffins

It's almost Fall, and at our house that means also apple-picking season!  The boys and I went to pick apples last week and thus we are making everything apple this week!  Apple and cheddar cheese slices for snacks, homemade apple sauce, apple pancakes for breakfast later this week, and of course, these yummy apple muffins!  I love Fall foods!  Pictured are mini-muffins.  I froze my regular sized muffins for baking up later this Fall and Winter. 

Whole Wheat Apple Muffins

Recipe adapted from http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2008/04/whole-wheat-apple-muffins/

2 cups (4 ounces) whole wheat flour
2 cups (4 1/4 ounces) all-purpose unbleached flour**
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 Tbsp. cinnamon
2 sticks (1 c.) unsalted butter, at room temperature
3/4 c. granulated sugar
3/4 c. dark brown sugar, packed, divided
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1 Tbsp. flaxseed meal with 3 Tbsp. warm water
2 cups plain greek yogurt
4 c. apples, peeled, cored, and coarsely chopped (about 4 large apples)

**I use the Ultra-grain blend from Costco.  It bakes like a white flour but has 9g whole grains per serving so I feel a little better about using that then plain white flour.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.  Line muffin tins with muffin papers.

In a large bowl, combine flours, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.

In a separate bowl, cream together salt, granulated sugar, and 1/2 c. brown sugar.  Beat until fluffy. Add the egg and flaxseed meal mixture and cream well.  Gently mix in the yogurt.  Do not over mix.  Combine with the dry ingredients.  Fold in the apples.

Divide mixture into muffin tins.  Sprinkle tops of muffins with remaining 1/4 c. brown sugar.  Bake for 10 minutes, turn down heat to 400 degrees and bake an additional 5-10 minutes until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.  Allow to cool in muffin tin for 5 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack. 

Enjoy!

Makes about 3 dozen regular sized muffins or gazillions of mini-muffins (an approximation).

Food for Thought: As always, here is my favorite tip about muffins. If you don't want a large amount of muffins right now, freeze the batter uncooked in the muffin tins.  Use the foil muffin papers.  They will hold up in the freezer better.  Then, when they have been in the freezer for about 2 hours, dump out of the pans and into freezer bags.  Label your bags or you will have mystery muffins!  When you are ready to eat them, simply pop the muffins, frozen, into your muffin pans.  Bake as per the usual instructions adding 5-10 minutes of baking time to allow for the thawing.  Yay for easy freezer cooking!