Oat-Cranberry-Walnut Muffins

I love having oats soaked overnight with cranberries for breakfast. I add walnuts in the morning, and eat it with some Greek yogurt. But this past weekend, when I went out of town to play a Beethoven program (the Prometheus Overture, the Fourth Piano Concerto, and the Ninth Symphony) I needed to do something with my Sunday morning portion of oats sitting in the fridge (I make three day's worth at a time in a mason jar). The hotel I was staying in didn't have breakfast, so I decided, in willy-nilly style, to make some muffins with the mixture.

The muffins turned out great, so, while I still remembered what I did, I wrote it down.

It's kind of like improvising and then composing, I guess. But you get to eat the results.

Here's the recipe:

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Put paper liners in a muffin tin (the recipe makes nine muffins).

In a 2-cup glass measuring cup combine

1 and 1/4 cups rolled oats and 1/2 cup dried cranberries. 

Cover the mixture with water (you will need to stir it a bit).

Add one egg, 1/4 cup oil (I used avacado oil) and 1/4 cup sugar. Mix it up. It should come out to the 2-cup line, because the oats absorb lots of the liquid. The above picture is a bit deceptive. The measuring cup is indeed full.

In a mixing bowl combine

1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

Pour the wet mixture into the dry, and mix. Spoon the mixture into the muffin tins, and bake for twenty minutes.

Take the muffins out of the oven, and let them sit in their tin for ten minutes. Then remove the muffins to a rack to cool.

I had such a wonderful time playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and I imagine that I will always associate the experience with these muffins. I'm also planning to make them to share with my whole family at Thanksgiving, but I will need to double the recipe.

The muffins are not that sweet, so if you like sweeter muffins you can add a bit more sugar, or sprinkle some on the top before baking them. And I always like to use cane sugar (the kind with larger caramel-colored crystals) when I bake.

And if you don't have dried cranberries, whole cranberry sauce (half a can if you are making one recipe, and a whole can if you are doubling it) would be great. I made my original muffins with prepared sweetened cranberry sauce (thus eliminating the need, for me, to have more sugar than 1/4 cup in the recipe).

NB: If you really want to make a full tin of muffins, you can always add more cranberries and more oats. I think that the liquid ingredients can stay the same, though.

NB2: Or have a muffin with a piece of 70% dark chocolate! Fantastic!