Recipe Tuesday - MMMMmuffins

Okay, I am no Martha Stewart, Rachel Ray or even a little Miss Suzy Homemaker. I like to cook when I have the time and the ingredients but otherwise in a busy momma's life, it's all about the short cuts.

To me, muffins are one of the more intimidating goodies to bake. Now little Miss Suzy Homemaker in the back.. you know who you are, right now is saying... "Muffins inti

midating, say what!" But it's true. I think perhaps I read one too many complicated recipes, shied at the many ingredients you are required to purchase and basically threw out the whole idea of making my own muffins.

Enter in the pre-made muffin mix.

We make cake from boxes, why not muffins? I know, I know, from scratch is really the best and my first attempt at muffins from a bag/box pretty much proved that. For lack of a better description, they were dead. lifeless. without pizazz or flavour.

So what's a momma of 3 hungry snackers to do? One word.

Improvise.

Take

• 1 cup of that applesauce I made up last week (any store bought will do too)
• 1 very well mashed banana
• 1/2 cup of chocolate chips

and add it to the mix and follow baking instructions. Or any other fruit you'd prefer.

Suddenly, the muffins weren't so dead, the kids are getting extra fruit and fibre in their diet and they are loving the touch of chocolate.

I thought I'd take it one step further. Remember how I said kids like things small? Well, I bought myself a mini muffin tray and I use the mix to make mini muffins. They are bite sized for little hands and it makes the muffins last longer. One batch of muffin mix (1/2 the bag) made like 36 mini muffins instead of the usual 12. I just dole them out through out the day when I need to give them a quick snack to tide them over or pop a couple in their backpack for snack time at school.

So while today's not a new recipe per say it is definitely a time saver tip. It takes literally 5 minutes to mix up and throw in the oven. And it's pretty cheap. A bag of muffin mix here costs about $3.99 and you get two batches out of it.

Okay my pan looks a little yucky there but I had a little "help" if you know what I mean. ;)

So, that's my frugal momma tip of the week. Please share yours with us. I'd love to get more ideas. Who knows, maybe I'll even let you host Recipe Tuesday next week. Cheers.