I’m really bad about feeding my sourdough starter. Every Saturday at noon an alert pops up on my screen telling me to feed it; most of the time I press ignore. Being unemployed has caused me to press the ignore button onmany an alert–why do it today when I can do it in my free time tomorrow?* I clearly need more structure in my life. This is kind of the reason I didn’t want to get involved with growing my own starter from scratch and instead opted to steal it from Miss M. I’m actually quite surprised I haven’t killed it yet, and very lucky my brother didn’t throw it out when he thought it was rancid salad dressing (he just left it on the counter–I know, what the hell? He’s 26.). So I finally got around to feeding it this evening, which left me with about 3/4 cups of discard.

I could very well claim that I hate wasting food, and thus didn’t want to discard the discard. Truthfully, it just pains me to throw away something I have managed to keep alive despite my negligence. Plus, it’s more of a pet than any goldfish I ever had and I didn’t throwthose out when still alive. Although I never baked my goldfish…** But that’s not the point. The point is that it’s kind of ridiculous to toss out all that flour, water and yeast only because I’m afraid it will otherwise multiply and take over the world. So I decided to make something. I didn’t want pancakes or waffles. Or some sort of weird discard bread. I wanted muffins. Fluffy muffins. And oh my god did my muffins turn out Fluffy.

These Sourdough Whole Wheat Apple Cinnamon Muffins are the product of an impromptu experiment and boast an unnecessarily long name. I poked around the ‘net to check out liquid-to-dry ingredient ratios on different kinds of muffin recipes, but that’s as far as I went. Then I just started measuring and adding and tasting the batter. And then I baked. And I have never seen muffins puff up this much in the oven. And I’ve never had suchmoist whole wheat muffins either. And I hate the word moist. The airiness provided by the starter really offsets that denseness whole wheat baked goods tend to have, making me feel like I was eating a muffin made of 100% white flour. I honestly couldn’t ask for more from a boring Thursday night baking adventure.

*Everything does get done and on time, but the procrastination bug is running rampant over here.
**However, one did manage to commit suicide by flipping itself out of the bowl onto my play table.

Sourdough Whole Wheat Apple Cinnamon Muffins

Makes 8 Muffins

3/4 cupunfed 100% hydration starter*
1 cup sifted white whole wheat flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
3 Tbsp. cinnamon
1 egg
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1/4 cup canola or vegetable oil
1 large apple, peeled, cored & cubed**

Topping
3 Tbsp. packed brown sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon

*My starter had the consistency of a thick cake batter.
**I used a granny smith, but any will suffice.

Preheat oven to 350F. Mix together everything but the apples and topping ingredients. It should be somewhat thick and goopy. Add in apples by hand. Oil your muffin tin and spread batter into 8 parts. Mix topping and sprinkle over muffins. Bake for 20-24 minutes, rotating halfway through. Muffins will be done when they pass the toothpick test. Let cool on rack.