Cooking with Elana's Pantry

I mentioned last week that I stumbled across Elana's Pantry and was set to try two recipes.

First a note: In her FAQ section, Elana strongly discourages substituting ingredients. She recommends a particular brand of almond flour and repeats that the results will not be the same if you don't use the same ingredients that she uses.

I can respect that. She worked hard to create recipes that work in a specific way.

But of course, that's not how I roll. So naturally I modified.

Both recipes were still surprisingly good.

Recipe #1: Cinnamon Bun Muffins

My modification was to replace the agave nectar with applesauce in the muffin mixture. The muffins were really moist and lighter than I would have expected.

I took them on my road trip and made my friend eat one so I could get the opinion of someone not on a crazy diet. A few hours later she asked for another.

Recipe #2: Breakfast Bars

Once again in this recipe I replaced the agave nectar with applesauce. It gave good sweetness, however, the agave nectar would add some stickiness and binding to the bars. The applesauce doesn't, so my bars were very crumbly.

Instead of the raisins, I used a combo of dried figs and prunes, cut into small pieces. Simply because it's what I had in my pantry.

These were just crumbly and I discovered that all the seeds kind of bothered my poor sensitive system. So I froze most of the pan.