Spring Blooms and Muffins

Last year we moved back to Chicago in August. You might remember we worked really hard and taming the "wild flower garden" in our backyard and creating a respectable area with some grass for our doggies. Well this spring we've had our fair share of surprises popping up. Tulips, daffodils, come really pretty purple flowers and a bunch of others. We've moved things around and made sense of the yard again and I have to say it's looking pretty good! One thing we missed out of last year was this awesome tree in our front yard! When we moved in it appeared to be just a run of this mill small tree. I took a few snapshots today, how pretty!





I wonder what it is!

Spring has also inspired me to try some new muffin flavors. I had a bag of frozen strawberries in my freezer so I did a little recipe search and came up Strawberry Muffin recipe. I have made these two weekends in a row and both times tweaked the recipe significantly so I am now claiming these gems as my own. These are really tasty and it it rare for me to make the same muffins back to back but I just couldn't help myself with these. I'll call this my Summertime Strawberry Muffins, only because I think these will be even better with fresh strawberries when they are in season. You can tweak this recipe yourself if you prefer to use real eggs and real sugar.

1/4 cup of vegetable oil
1/4 cup of egg whites
1/2 cup of milk
2 teaspoons vanilla

1/2 teaspoon of salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup of splenda baking sugar
2 tablespoons of splenda brown sugar
1 and 1/2 cups of flour
1 cup of chopped strawberries


Heat oven to 375

Whisk first four ingredients and set aside, unless you use a real egg instead of the white stirring works just as well.

Next mix dry ingredients, then stir in chopped strawberries. Pour in milk mixture and stir all together.

I make my muffins as big as I can and get about 9 out of this.

Bake for 25 minutes, cool on wire rack.