Oatmeal chocolate chip muffins!

After being told that such a thing as "Clusterfluff" ice cream exists, I had to go out and attempt to find this at Safeway (it was delicious, but it's very rich, so you can't really eat much in a sitting).  Since I was there, I figured that it wouldn't hurt to get the ingredients I needed for the chocolate chip oatmeal muffins that I'd been thinking about making. This way, I could make them tonight and be able to eat one for breakfast tomorrow before getting a real set of groceries.

I had a really nice mise framed up using the monkey plate, but my phone decided that I wasn't really serious about those pictures, and they didn't get recorded.  :(  That means we have to go with a boring list of ingredients instead (I'm copying the recipe because I never trust links to live forever. Plus, I can specify any changes made):

• 1c flour (this was in my measuring cup)
• 1c oats (already in a mixing bowl)
• 1tsp baking soda (in the alligator segment of the monkey plate, along with)
• 1/4tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/3c brown sugar (in the elephant segment)
• 1 egg (in it's cracking bowl)
• 1/2 stick butter (1/4c) softened (walrus segment)
• 1.5tsp vanilla extract (in a shot glass in the alligator segment)
• 1c chocolate chips (monkey segment)

Preheat oven to 350.  Pour half the milk over the oats, and leave for 5-10 minutes to soak and hydrate (I totally had a picture of this too, but the phone ate that as well.)

Add the sugar to the egg, and mix until smooth.

Add the butter and vanilla, and mix that together as well.

Add the rest of the dry ingredients, leaving only the milk and chips out. Mix-y mix-y mix-y.

OMG THE MILK! Probably not a surprise, was it? Guess what? Mix carefully, because until that milk is incorporated enough to not be a puddle, it's going to splash all over.

Fold in the chocolate chips. The original recipe calls for muffin liners, but I didn't pick any up, so I just smeared my muffin tin with butter.  If you have liners, or can reasonably make the trip, it's probably worthwhile to get them.

Divide up into the muffin tin. Watch out for greedy monkeys, as they may be spying on you, looking to see how they can get those chocolate chips back. If you have turbinado sugar, the original recipe suggest sprinking some on top. I don't, so I didn't. Bake for 15-18 minutes (or, 22ish minutes if your oven is kind of sucky) until a skewer comes out clean.

Pop one out, and cover it in butter:

Keep in mind that since these muffins have be absolute minimum leavening in them, they're not going to puff up a lot.  It probably would have been a good idea to let them cool a bit before removing from the pan, because the bases kind of squish down.

The other 11. If you look closely, you'll see that a few chocolate chips are missing, and the muffin at 1 o'clock has had a bit of a structural problem. The melty chocolate chips don't really have much affinity either way between sticking and not, so this is where muffin liners would have helped a lot.

I'm not sure where to rank these on the scale of healthy-not. The oatmeal makes me think that they're healthy, and if I'd used the whole wheat flour specified in the original recipe, that'd be double true.  They're also not really full of sugar, so that makes it sound like they're really just some deliciously toasted oatmeal. Of course, then there's the chocolate chips. Remember how I mentioned above that the low level of leavening makes the bottoms collapse if you eat them hot? If you compress the bread part of these muffins, what do you think happens? Yep, you get a bottom crust, and then a disk of molten chocolate that has crushed all the puffy bread, then the muffin top that's fluffy again. That's delicious, but it certainly makes it seem like these have to be more on the side of unhealthy.

Either way, they're full of delicious, and I think that they will do nicely as breakfast this week.