Carrot Muffins

My parents came to drop J off ten days ago and brought us some farm fresh produce from Papa Billy's garden. But, we had an over abundance of carrots AND they're coming back later today with promises of more vegetables. The people at my house will only eat so many steamed carrots and carrot soup...So, what to do?


All of the carrots were small like these ones - ranging in size from a small "normal" carrot to the size of a large paperclip. My good friend Martha has a recipe that I decided to try - I figure muffins are good freezing food...I did pull out the food processor though. There was NO WAY I was going to hand grate those dinky (but oh so tasty) little carrots.


The batter came out very thick and I actually added a splash or two of milk because it was just too thick and too dense to manipulate with the spoon. And as I made the first batch, I made lots of mental notes in my head.

The first batch came out of the oven and were yummy, so it was time to make a second batch (seriously, I could probably make four more batches tonight and still have carrots left and that's not taking into account the new carrots I will likely acquire tonight!). I'm a big believer of following a recipe the first time you make it and then tweaking it later (small tweaks are okay - I'm not a huge walnut fan, so I often sub in some pecans and in this recipe I opted for canola oil over butter. Because I'm too lazy to measure and melt butter).


The second time I made my changes - I doubled the spices, added close to 1/4 cup of milk, swapped out 3/4 cup of all purpose flour for whole wheat (which is why the milk is more than the splash I used the first time).

Can you tell which is the first batch and which is the second batch?

OH...if the first batch were yummy, the second batch were heaven! The only other modification I'd make would be to grate the carrots by hand - I think they'd be finer and juicier and better, but these were awesome. They passed the test of my two year old, who asked for more muffins ALL evening, my eight year old nephew, my brother-in-law and my sister-in-law (who had a batch #1 muffin and still thought they were super!). Oh, and of course it passed the Alex test...which can be tricky when the food is "snack" food trying to be healthier!

If I didn't have yogurt, I'd probably use 3/4 cup of milk but sour it first with some fresh orange juice and add some zest to the muffins. That would be yummy!