Late Night Chocolate Pecan Muffins and Coconut Butter

I didn't go grocery shopping today like I normally do and I really wanted to make some muffins for breakfast... and a late night snack. So I found a really tasty looking recipe that I thought I could pull off (Found Here at the Baking Sheet).

Unfortunately, I was out of the following: whole wheat flour,vanilla, vanilla soy milk and walnuts! It is really hard to make decent baked goods without vanilla and the whole point of these muffins were that they had walnuts in it! Dammit! I decided that I didn't want to wait until tomorrow and went ahead with the recipe anyways. I had to modify it though to incorporate the fact that I lacked a couple key ingredients. Here is what I did:

Late Night Chocolate Pecan Muffins
Makes 8

• 3/4 cup of stone flour
• 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/4 cup cocoa
• 1/2 tsp instant espresso powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 cup maple syrup
• 3/4 cup of soy milk
• 2 Tbsp canola oil
• 1 Tbsp coconut flakes
• 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts and 8 more for the garnish

Line or grease a muffin tin and preheat the oven to 350 F. Combine all the dry ingredients in a large bowl and mix. Combine the Maple syrup, milk, and oil in a small bowl and mix. now pour the wet ingredients into the dry and stir until just combined. Add the chopped pecans and the coconut and stir again. Fill the muffin tins about 3/4 of the way and bake for 18 - 20 minutes.

Learned this trick to cooling muffins without a rask from theppk.com

I served these up with some homemade coconut butter. How do you make this? Take a couple cups of unsweetened coconut (DO NOT use sweetened, I tried and it didn't work. Then I found this warning while searching online to figure out why) and put it in your food processor.

This is about 5 minutes into processing

and... 10 min later - Buttah!

Processor for 10 - 15 minutes, scarping down the bowl once in a while. The coconut will first shred and then will start to clump up and when you think you can't bear the sound of your food processor anymore, voila! It will be pretty soft at first, but will harden if you leave it at room temperature. I was shocked at how easy this was..If you like coconut, give it a try!

So the question - did these work without the vanilla? Every time I forget or omit the vanilla I regret it, but I didn't notice it so much in these. They were light and chocolaty and the pecans were a great added crunch. I still stand by the rule, never omit the vanilla, but these do not feel like they are lacking in anything.