Carrot Muffins

I was looking for some inspiration for something to bake today, so little miss and I did a little bit of foodgawking this morning, and I told her to pick what looked good for us to make. She chose a photo of delicious looking carrot cake bars. Yum. Unfortunately, most of the family has given up dessert for Lent (as I may have mentioned before), so I was worried that a cake might not be the best choice. Not to be deterred, I used her choice as inspiration for what we did choose to make - carrot muffins! See? They're muffins. Totally different from cake. They can be eaten for breakfast. And they count as a veggie serving (just agree with me on that one...). Totally not dessert. Aren't I thoughtful?

Instead of just making the recipe that we found into cupcakes and calling them muffins, I decided to look for an actual muffin recipe, though one that keeps the spirit of, well, carrot cake. I settled on this one, from the joy of baking website. That is the website that provided the delicious bread pudding muffin recipe, so I was pretty sure that it would be a good choice.

We made this in stages today, since it has been nice and warm outside, so we've been wanting to play outside quite a bit. So first we picked the recipe, then we went outside and collected pine cones. Then we came in and measured and mixed the dry ingredients. Then we had a little bit of downtime with our favorite PBS dinosaurs on Dinosaur Train. Then I shredded up five carrots (aren't they pretty?) and two apples, added in the wet ingredients, and got these guys into the oven. Then we played some go-fish.

Then the house started smelling really good. Between the cinnamon and the coconut, I was very much looking forward to tasting these. So was little miss. Anway, after about 24 minutes, the timer beeped. And out came these:









Yum.

Well, not yet. I mean, they are yummy this way, but we weren't quite done.

How can you make them better? Cream cheese frosting. I mean, what is carrot cake without cream cheese frosting? I mean... muffins...

These were really tasty, and will be breakfasts and snacks for the next couple of days.