Hearty apple blackberry muffins

These apple blackberry muffins are made with less sugar and instead use grated apple, which adds moisture and sweetness to these hearty breakfast muffins.

These apple blackberry muffins are quite low in sugar. I'd say they definitely fall into the "healthier" muffin category, along with these blueberry bran muffins, which are also low in sugar. They are the perfect hearty breakfast muffins, made with oats, yogurt, grated apple, and blackberries.

Both the blueberry bran and these apple blackberry muffins are actually variations of the same recipe and so they follow a very similar formula.

If you compare this recipe to these rhubarb muffins with sour cream  or these honey blueberry muffins, you can see that there's much less sugar in the recipe below: one third the sugar to be exact. But remember fruit purées are a common baking substitution for replacing sugar when you are baking with less sugar. So here, we have grated apple in the muffin batter to add sweetness, but also moisture.

Cinnamon and vanilla are two other ingredients that are good at tricking you into thinking a baked good tastes sweet. Don't cut them out of this recipe because you will end up with muffins that taste very bland.

These muffins are mixed using the traditional muffin mixing method: your dry ingredients go in one bowl and your wet ingredients go in another, then you combine them to make the muffin batter.

Since sugar technically falls under the wet ingredient category of baking ingredients, you will treat the brown sugar like a wet ingredient in this recipe and combine it with the other wet ingredients. Were you to whisk it with the dry ingredients, the brown sugar would stay lumpy and you would run the risk of ending up with a muffin batter that is under-sweetened, with chunks of sugar hiding in places.

One baking substitution you might consider for this recipe is to use plain yogurt instead of sour cream. While both are acidic dairy ingredients, full fat sour cream has 14 % fat, while plain yogurt has 2 % fat (more or less depending on the product you use).

Both yogurt and sour cream work in this recipe, but from my tests, I much preferred the muffins baked with full fat sour cream which had a more tender and moist crumb.

I also tested baking the muffins in silicone muffin liners in muffin pans versus paper liners. Silicone works great, as does paper. It's up to you what you prefer to use. Just note that with silicone, the muffins might take a few minutes longer to bake since silicone is more insulating.

These muffins keep pretty well at room temperature for up to 4 days. This recipe makes 12 muffins so you may want to freeze part of the batch for later. I freeze them in a single layer in a large freezer bag. Then when I want a muffin, I take one out and microwave it for about 30 seconds on high. This is just enough to defrost the muffin completely and heat the muffin through so that it's just like a freshly baked muffin in the end!