I'm a Baking Machine

My name is Lauren and I'm totally addicted to baking stuff. 

One year ago, I was terrified of my oven. I have gladly gotten over that fear, and I have now successfully baked about 13 things. Thus, I am a baking machine. This week alone, I have baked FOUR things. This is huge. Someday, I'll maybe even bake bread. You know, the kind of bread you have to add yeast and science to? (ooo...this makes me shutter in fear just thinking about it)

I had some frozen blueberries that I needed to use up (because they were taking up an inordinate amount of space in my freezer.) Found an awesome recipe on Skinnytaste.com (another new favorite site, thanks Pinterest.) This is one of those great recipes that replaces butter with apple sauce. YUM.

Another awesome thing? Similar to the pumpkin muffins from yesterday, these weigh in at just 147 calories per muffin.  

I forgot to take a ton of pictures of this, but it's OK because Skinnytaste.com does an awesome job of taking way better pictures than I do. So please check our their pictures if you need a visual [right here]:

Make sure you use UNSWEETENED natural applesauce.
I almost got tricked in the grocery store. Mainly because this
is the first time I've purchased applesauce and I didn't realize there was
more than one flavor....oops.

They taste sooo good. 

Here's the recipe, again from Skinnytaste.com, adapted for my process:

A cup of unsweetened applesauce (careful, they'll try to trick you)

2 cups of whole wheat flour (I like Bob's Red Mill because it's not too grainy)

.5 cup o sugar (I used a big old squirt of agave, worked pretty well)

1 tsp baking soda

.5 tsp salt

1.5 cup of blueberries (i used frozen and just zapped them a little bit so they were only semi-frozen)

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

2 tbs butter (amazing how little butter I needed for this recipe, but how moist they turned out)

Oven to 325°. Mix dry ingredients in a big bowl. Put all the wet ingredients (minus blueberries) in your mixer and turn your mixer to lowish-mediumish. Slowly add the dry to the wet. Don't turn on your mixer too fast unless you want a flour cloud in your kitchen (pro tip: this is not fun to clean up, and will make your husband/roommate/cat laugh at you. Your dog won't laugh at you, because they love you too much, and would probably do the same thing if they were baking, right Bella?)

When it's mixed, and not a second later, turn off your mixer. Fold in the blueberries, but do it gently so you don't turn the batter purple-gray.

Put the batter into greased muffin tins. Bake for about 25ish minutes. Just check them and take them out when you stick something pointy into them and it comes out clean.