Happy Wonderful October

The most beautiful month in Arizona has come. Finally. The 100 degree days are over and the 90's never felt so good. Today, October kicked off with a drop in temperature, a breeze that smelled of rain, and small monsoon.

I love fall in the desert.
The evenings are cooler and the mornings are crisp.
It's a time for afternoon picnics and patio dinners.
Pumpkins and decorative gourds start popping up in grocery stores and on kitchen tables.
The ocotillo leaves turn a beautiful yellow-orange before dropping to the dirt below.
The sun hangs lower in the sky and casts its "fall glow" on Tucson.

You can just feel the desert give a sigh of relief.

I decided to celebrate the first day of October by baking molasses-cranberry muffins. Usually I bake this as a bread, but recently I've been on a muffin-kick, and I think everything just tastes better and is more fun to eat in muffin form.

*Baker be warned. These are pretty freakin healthy muffins. I try to use as little sugar, butter and oil as possible when I bake (cue *gasps* from real cooks and bakers everywhere). But that just means I get to eat more of what I cook because it's healthier ;)

This recipe makes 2 dozen muffins. Let's hope I can restrict myself to one muffin a day.

Ingredients


1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup oat bran
1 cup buckwheat flour
1 (heaping) cup oats

1 tsp salt
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda

4 eggs
4 tsp vanilla
1 cup milk
1/2 cup yogurt (Greek yogurt is the best!)
1/2 cup olive oil  (I have used apple sauce in the past and it is definitely dryer this way, but still tastes great)
1/3 cup molasses

1 bag dried cranberries
Pecans/walnuts to sprinkle on top

Directions


1. Mix all of the dry ingredients together in a small bowl.
2. Mix all of the wet ingredients together in a big bowl.
3. Add the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and stir together.
4. Dump in the bag of cranberries (and eat a few) and mix in.
5. Spoon out the batter into the oiled muffin pans.
6. Cook at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.