Friday, May 4, 2012

Muffins for Horses

I have been reading some notes on vegan baking and decided to try making vegan muffins.  Of course my favorite vegans are horses.  I went with the banana-for-egg substitution and swapped in juice for milk.

The first batch I made the oatmeal variation and added sliced strawberries.

For the second batch I followed the "banana" variation in the book reducing the apple juice and adding extra banana as well as adding a mashed banana for the egg.  I didn't mash these bananas as thoroughly so there were some banana chunks in these.

The results:
-The horses and humans all liked the strawberry muffins, although some humans pointed out that they were not as sweet as traditional muffins.  They were also very moist, to the point of being too moist I think.  I decided to cut back on the liquid a little in the future.

-Most of the horses liked the Banana Chunk muffins.  The exception being the thoroughbred mare who picked up her piece of muffin at the edge, thought about for a moment, then spit it out on the ground and delicately stomped on it.  She's a sweetheart.  However, after seeing her human and the boys (the geldings around her) eat the muffins she decided that she did like them.
 -The humans all enjoyed the banana muffins.

Recipe for Banana Chunk muffins:

1 3/4 cup flour
1/3 cup sugar
(The one thing I don't like about this recipe is that you use every measuring cup in the set for these 2 ingredients.)

2 tsp baking POWDER
1/4 tsp salt

Mix all of the above in a medium mixing bowl and make a "well" in the center.

4 bananas mashed with chunks (I smash them in a bowl with a fork)
1/4 cup apple juice
1/4 cup vegetable oil

Mix the bananas, juice and oil together and dump them all at once into the "well" in the dry ingredients.  stir everything together quickly.  Fill 12 muffin cups with the batter and bake at 400 deg F for about 20 minutes.

My Better Homes and Gardens New Baking Book tells me that using the paper cups with banana muffins is not a great idea.  That was demonstrated with the strawberry muffins which stuck to the papers.  So for the Banana Chunk muffins I just sprayed the muffin pan with a squirt of Pam in the bottom of each cup before filling them.  I have one of those nifty plastic muffin trays that can go in the dishwasher so clean up is easy.  If you have to scrub by hand you might want to use papers anyway.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Last weekend Pepper and I won "prettiest bonnet" at the Easter Bonnet contest sponsored by ETI.  He was thrilled as the prize included a bucket with horse cookies in it.  Far more exciting than a ribbon! At least from a horse's perspective.

We did not win the egg-and-spoon race however.  It turns out that the galloping and lead changes so useful in a barrel race do not work as well in an egg-and-spoon race.  He tried though.

Pictures of our winning bonnets:
This is Pepper's bonnet with flowers.  It also has a reflective trim in case I want to use it at night.



This is a picture of my helmet cover hat from the test run the day before.  I based the look on an old painting I pinned on pinterest: http://pinterest.com/pin/161425967863730443/


Thursday, March 29, 2012

My new Blog

This is my new blog. I plan to share some of the stuff I think up in my everyday life.  From baking (for horses and humans) to fixing lawn chairs with bailing twine.

About me: I am an engineer with a darling quarter horse Pepper, a handful of kooky friends and millions of  random ideas.  I plan to use this blog to push me into actually exploring and trying some of those ideas.

Real content to follow soon.