No-butter honey muffins: all the goodness of simplicity
No-butter honey muffins: all the goodness of simplicity
Equipment
- 2 Bowls
- Muffin molds
Ingredients
- 200 g Cornstarch
- 400 g Flour
- 350 g Sugar
- 250 ml Milk
- 4 Eggs
- 1 sachet Baking Powder
- 1 jar Honey
- 50 ml Extra Virgin Olive Oil (or Farchioni Vanilla or Cinnamon Cake Mix)
Instructions
- Beat sugar and eggs in a bowl until smooth.
- Stir in milk and then oil.
- In a separate bowl, mix cornstarch, flour and yeast.
- Combine the two compounds and mix everything together.
- Pour the mixture into the muffin molds.
- Bake at 180 °C for about 10 minutes.
- Remove muffins from the oven and, when cool, cover them with honey.
Muffins are one of those desserts that everyone likes. They are perfect for breakfast or for a snack, and they can be interpreted in a thousand different ways: today we will prepare honey muffins, and we will do it without using any butter. The lactose-intolerant will love them… but there is more to it. These muffins are light, digestible, tasty and healthy, because they contain extra virgin olive oil rather than butter.
No-butter honey muffins: why do they taste better?
Using extra virgin olive oil instead of butter in desserts is not just an option, but a solution preferred by many. You will soon see why:
- Olive oil is liquid, blends easily with the other ingredients and makes your dough more even and easily workable
- It withstands high temperatures and retains its flavor after cooking.
- It makes dough softer and crumbly.
- Desserts prepared with olive oil keep longer than those prepared with butter, which tend to lose their texture after a while.
If this was not enough, olive oil is definitely healthier than butter, as it is rich in antioxidant substances which counter cellular aging and monounsaturated fats which lower blood cholesterol levels.
You may be wondering why we decided to use olive oil rather than seed oil for our no-butter muffins. It is easily explained: the uninitiated may think that seed oil is lighter because it is practically odorless and tasteless. Actually it contains more perishable fats, which deteriorate during cooking, and may damage your liver.
No-butter honey muffins: a few tips
This muffin recipe is very straightforward, and you will succeed if you just follow these simple precautions.
- Use two separate bowls to mix powders and wet ingredients. This does not apply to eggs and sugar.
- To get a smooth mixture, you will combine the contents of the two bowls only after they have perfectly blended.
- Do not forget to sieve the powders first in order to avoid lumps.
- We recommend adding cornstarch to the flour. Its very fine grain size will improve the rising of the mix and make it softer.
- If your honey is too thick (crystallization is a completely natural process in good quality honeys), just heat the jar in hot water (less than 40°C).
- We recommend that you select a delicate olive oil, which will not hide the flavor of the other ingredients. For our muffins we used the Farchioni Vanilla Extra Virgin Olive Oil Cake Mix, containing only cold-pressed EVO oil and natural vanilla flavors. It was developed specifically as a healthy and tasty alternative to butter and seed oil. If you are looking for a taste that reminds you of Christmas, you can use the Farchioni Cinnamon Cake Mix, where natural cinnamon flavors are added to cold-pressed EVO oil.
Now that we have revealed all our secrets, we can’t wait for you to try our recipe and find out if butter-free muffins are actually as good as they sound!
