Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Milk-Free Orange Honey Muffins

DN's milk allergy is really strange. Sometimes, he can take cakes or biscuits with traces of milk in them and be perfectly fine. Sometimes, he eats a chocolate wafer biscuit and bursts into rashes. Up until now, we still don't know how much he milk he can actually take and we're not going to feed it to him bit by bit until he reaches the tipping point either. But thankfully, his allergy is really not that serious. At least he can take traces of milk, and even a little bit of butter.

Until he gets over this allergy (when he was 7 months old, his PD said some babies outgrow it by the time they're 1... I guess DN is not one of them!), this means no ice-cream, no yoghurt, no milk chocolate, no cheese and not too much butter. This also means we have to be careful with food when we eat out : no pizza, no creamy pasta, no cheese baked rice, no cream-based soups, no mashed potatoes, no scrambled eggs , no milky fish soup noodles. As you can probably guess, we never go Italian.

So before we baked muffins on Sunday, I surfed around for a milk-free muffin recipe. I rejected many recipes because they called for way too many ingredients. Gluten free soy compound? Err, I don't think my NTUC will have that. Rice milk? Who's going to drink the rest?! Apple cider vinegar? Eeep!

Finally I found this easy recipe that called for 'normal' things like honey, orange juice, sugar and flour, whoopee! The only thing I did differently was add 2 eggs instead of the egg substitute, used real butter instead of soy margarine and added banana chunks into each muffin. DN had a ball mixing all the ingredients together...

... adding (or flinging, at one point -_-) the banana chunks...

... and staring at the muffins as they baked in the oven.

They finally came out, nice, brown and smelling delicious! And we all sat down with some cold barley tea (soya bean milk for DN), butter and jam.

Try the recipe if you like light, fluffy muffins. If you like your muffins dense like cakes, then this is not the recipe for you. It's very light and tastes really healthy because it's not oily or sugary sweet. And it works as a basic muffin recipe because I can see it working with fillings like raisins, cranberries, apple chunks or chocolate chips. This recipe is going to be a permanent fixture on my fridge for sure. :)

But all good things must come to an end... and we can never escape from the bothersome washing up. *sigh*


No comments: