Caramel Apple Muffin Tops

Not this last week, but actually the week before, I made Caramel Apple Muffin Tops out of 500 Vegan Recipes.  I have a muffin top pan that I swear I have never used to make muffin tops.  I used it to make hamburger buns and vegan Yorkshire pudding, but never actual muffin tops.  So, when I was searching for a muffin recipe to make before work one day and saw this recipe, I thought it was definitely a match.

The recipe calls for a sturdy apple, such as Granny Smith.  However, I only had a few Fuji apples in my fridge, so I used one of those.  The longest part of the process was making the caramel apples.

It took quite a while for the liquid to reduce into a thick caramel sauce.  If you think the apples look great in that picture above, let me tell you, they smelled heavenly!  I didn't have any Sucanat, but I did have some vanilla cinnamon sugar.  I used 2 teaspoons of that in place of the Sucanat.

The recipe makes 6 good sized muffin tops.  I will say that the muffin tops stay flat, though and don't look like much of a muffin top when they were done baking.  They looked more like a muffin pancake (see picture below).  The texture of the finished muffin top was a bit dry.  Perhaps that's because I didn't have any quick cooking oatmeal and used 1/2 cup (instead of 3/4 cup) of oat flour instead.  I probably should have upped the applesauce a little.  Whatever the reason, the muffin tops were not moist and crumbly, but dense and dry.

I could definitely taste the oats in the muffin, but the cinnamon and caramel flavors from the apple mixture was lost.  I thought the muffin tasted a bit bland, and I attribute that to having no spices in the muffin batter.  I think the depth of the caramel apple theme would have been deepened by adding spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom?) into the batter before the caramel apples were added.

Jordan liked the taste of the muffin batter, as evidenced below. :)  She was chasing that bowl across the floor to lick up every drop of the batter.  I had one leftover muffin top that I ate a couple of days later and it still tasted great.  (I stored it in a green box to keep it fresh.)  All I had to do was heat it up a bit and it was good to go.