Dairy-free Muffins: Soy Milk Muffins with Apples & Cinnamon

It's not very often that you wake up and stumble upon happiness for no reason. You do sometimes, though. When you do, something starts to bubble inside you and you feel the happy need to get those bubbles out of you. Otherwise, silly hiccups follow and bother you all day long. 

Something similar happened to me yesterday. I woke up to a happy morning and then headed for the kitchen to bake some muffins. After passing by the apples on the counter top (gift of a neighbour from his garden), I reached for the small dark jar in which I keep the ground cinnamon. By the way, the first sniff at the ground cinnamon let all the particles of inspiration in and around. No surprises! Cinnamon is my favourite after all!

My next move was to the fridge where I found a carton of soy milk. Well, I hadn't tried soy milk for any cake or muffins before, but I was more than ready to go for it. Happiness was there, inspiration was there and three small eggs were there too. And here comes the recipe to spongy, moist and above all dairy-free apple muffins with ground cinnamon. 

Ingredients

3 small eggs

1 cup granulated sugar

1 cup vegetable oil (I used sunflower oil)

1  cup soy milk 

2 ½ cups all-purpose flour (add more if the batter becomes too runny)

4 small apples 

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 tablespoon baking powder

a pinch of salt

2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 200 °C and lightly grease or line with paper baking cups mini muffin baking pans. Feel free to use other size muffin pans.  

2. In a large bowl, blend together the flour, baking powder, and salt. 

3. In a medium bowl, beat the egg and sugar until smooth and creamy. Add in the soy milk, oil and the vanilla extract. Mix well until smooth.

4. Combine the two mixtures, blending until the dry ingredients are moist. Put it aside.

5. Peel and core the apples and roughly chop them. Puree them in a food processor with the cinnamon. 

6. Fold in the apple-cinnamon puree into the batter. Don't use the electric mixer. Use a wooden spoon instead and don't stir much. 

7. Fill the muffin cups about three-quarters full.

8. Bake for 15 to 18 minutes or until a wooden toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean. 

9.Cool completely on a wire rack.

10. Sprinkle with powdered sugar before serving.