Whole wheat lemon poppy seed muffins

I felt like making something. We have a bunch of whole wheat flour, which I considerably over-purchased, and poppy seeds and no plan for either. Lemon poppy seed muffins are delicious and I hadn't made them before. So whole wheat lemon poppy seed muffins it was. These will be a little less bad for you than anything made with regular all-purpose or another bleached flour but let's not pretend it's "healthy." Here's the recipe where I started.

Here's what you need:

Dry ingredients

- 1/2 c + 1tbsp granulated sugar

- Zest from 2 lemons

- 1+1/2 c whole wheat flour

- 1/4 c poppy seeds (like half a spice container)

- 1+1/2 tsp baking powder

- 1/4 tsp baking soda

- 1/2 tsp sea salt

Wet ingredients

- 5 tbsp butter (less than a single stick)

- 3/4 c plain yogurt (I used Greek)

- Juice from 1 lemon

- 1 egg

- 1 tsp vanilla extract

Topping

- Big/coarse decorating sugar

Quick version:

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees, or wait a few steps

2. Grease muffin pan

3. Zest both lemons, squeeze juice from one (you'll have one leftover and bald)

4. In a medium bowl, mix zest and sugar with hands until combined and yellow

5. Add rest of dry ingredients, whisk

6. Melt butter and cool a bit, don't let it solidify again

7. Add rest of wet ingredients, whisk

8. Pour wet into dry, mix until even and don't over do it

9. Add thick batter to muffin pan openings, makes 12

10. Bake for 16-17 minutes, clean toothpick means done

I had a couple changes from the starting point recipe. We didn't have raw sugar and I didn't want to buy it so I used granulated. We always have Greek yogurt so I used that. I did one egg (though regretted it, more on that later). And I used relatively coarse sea salt. None of these changes significantly altered the recipe. Update 6/2 - finer sea salt would be better.

Getting started I never preheat the oven immediately, because I go kinda slowly and regularly get distracted by the two little kids. It made sense for me to do this between working with the dry and wet ingredients. I did use cooking spray to grease the muffin pan before doing anything else.

Next is the dry ingredients. First zest the lemons. We have a lemon zester so this was easy. If you don't have a zester you can use a peeler or even a just a knife to remove the outer part of the peel then chop it up into tiny pieces. In a medium sized mixing bowl combine the zest with the sugar with your hands until its thoroughly mixed and the sugar is all yellow. Then add rest of dry ingredients listed above (flour, poppy seeds, baking powder, baking soda, sea salt) and whisk together.

Now the wet ingredients. Melt the butter in the microwave then bring the temp back down in the fridge so it's not hot. In a small mixing bowl add the butter and the rest of the wet ingredients (yogurt, lemon juice, egg, vanilla extract) and whisk together, making sure to break up the egg yolk. Once ready pour the wet ingredients into the medium bowl with the dry ingredients and combine. Don't over-mix, though make sure everything is even.

The batter was indeed (as mentioned in the linked recipe) very thick. Spread into the 12 openings on the greased muffin pan. I felt the need to press the batter down into the holes in an attempt to see how evenly I distributed everything. At this point I wasn't very confident but I was always going to see it through to the end.

Sprinkle the tops with the coarse decorating sugar and put into the oven. Bake 16-17 minutes (or start at 15 and then check every minute). A clean toothpick is always the trick for doneness but with the thick batter I wasn't sure how accurate that'd be. I probably ended up leaving them in a minute too long though it wasn't a huge deal. Ideally you get a bit of golden brown edges for these muffins and I only got that on a few (it's annoying how ovens, even new ones, don't bake evenly).

Anyway, the day of doing these I was somewhat disappointed and almost didn't write this up. They ended up, shocker, more dense than I liked and didn't get exactly the flavor I like when buying store bought. But in the days since I'm liking them considerably more and have been pleasantly surprised. Maybe they just needed to cool and sit for a day. The ones that did brown a bit were slightly over-baked unfortunately. Some lessons were learned.

Next time, and there will be a next time, I'll make some changes. To start, ideally the muffins are bigger and have a sizable delectable muffin top so I'd probably increase the recipe overall by 50% and fill the muffin pan holes up. Then I'd want to do something about the density so the eggs should be doubled for a more cake-y texture. Finally be extra generous with the sprinkling sugar. All together this would look like:

Dry ingredients

- 3/4 c + 1 tbsp granulated sugar

- Zest from 3 lemons

- 2+1/4 c whole wheat flour

- 3/8 c poppy seeds

- 2+1/4 tsp baking powder

- 3/8 tsp baking soda

- 3/4 tsp sea salt

Wet ingredients

- 7.5 tbsp butter

- 1+1/8 c plain yogurt

- Juice from 1+1/2 lemons

- 3 eggs

- 1+1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Topping

- Big/coarse decorating sugar

There are some awkward amounts and it could use some fine tuning, but I'd figure it out. Time to finish baking would probably to have to be a bit longer too.

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Update 4/2/22:

Fixed couple presumed typos (amounts) in ingredient list after comparing to original recipe