Bran

Today I spontaneously decided to make bran muffins. Now, I know muffins can be a little difficult to make without eggs but I didn't realize it would take me 15 minutes to find a reasonable sounding vegan bran muffin recipe. There were many that simply omitted the eggs and substituted nothing -- I decided not to trust those ones. In the end I settled on this one:

1 cup all-bran cereal
1 cup water, warm
1 tablespoon ground flaxseed
3 tablespoons water
1/2 cup oil
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup chocolate chips


1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Put the bran and warm water in a bowl together, let sit 2-3 minutes.
3. Simmer the flaxseed in the 3 tablespoons water until thickened, 1-2 minutes.
4. Blend all ingredients together until well blended.
5. Pour into muffin tins and bake 18-20 minutes.

The flaxseed/water combination is the egg substitute here. After heating the two they have roughly the consistency of an egg white. I don't believe that it will help the muffins rise any but it will certainly help to stick everything together.

This recipe claimed to make a dozen muffins, but as you can see it didn't quite do that:


While the muffins were cooking it gave me a chance to lick the bowl. Muffin dough sure isn't as exciting to make as bread dough, but it tastes a hell of a lot better! Yum!

20 minutes pass....



They're done! Not looking too great, however. I let them cool for 5 minutes before trying to dig them out of the pan but a few of them still fell apart. Out of the 9 that went in, I ended up with 5 that stayed intact to the end.



I think the problem is that they are just too moist. Next time I'll be adding extra flour and/or bran to thicken them up. I'm also thinking of getting the little paper muffin things so I don't have any issues digging them out of the tray. All in all these muffins taste very good, perhaps a little too chocolaty, but aren't as firm as I'd like.