Eating Seasonally: Halloween Candy made "Healthy"

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Oatmeal-Flax Seed-Candy Bar Muffins

One year we'll accept the fact that we don't get many Trick-or-treaters and just not buy much candy. (And of course, that year we will have 85 kids show up and have to make an emergency candy run or hide in the house with the lights off.) But since that hasn't happened yet, we inevitably spend the week after Halloween alternating between trying to be good & not overeat the leftovers and saying "maybe we should just finish it off fast, so it's out of here!" This recipe helped us finish off the candy way too fast, but also gave us a false feeling of being virtuous because it contains other ingredients that are healthy.

I did at least try to cut out a lot of the sugar & fat of a standard muffin recipe, to compensate for what's in the candy. But yeah, given how fast I can inhale one of these and how tasty they are, I'm really not doing my body any favours.

Ingredients:
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/2 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup milk
1/3 cup applesauce
2 T vegetable oil
1 t vanilla
1/4 cup ground flax seed
1/2 t salt
1/2 t baking soda
2 t baking powder
2 cups rolled oats
1 cup all purpose flour
15-20 mini candy bars, coarsely chopped

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 F and prepare 12 standard sized muffin cups (paper liners, oil, whatever works for you).
2. Mix egg, sugar, milk, applesauce, oil, & vanilla. Add dry ingredients & mix until combined, then stir in candy.
3. Divide batter between 12 muffin cups. Bake for 18-20 minutes until set and lightly browned.

Notes:
-for your body to get any of the goodness out of the flax seeds, they need to be ground. You can buy them whole & grind them yourself in a spice grinder/coffee grinder, or you can buy them already milled. If you take option #2, keep them in the freezer after you open them to prolong their shelf life.
-the first time I tried this, I tossed the candy bars into the food processor. This resulted in some big chunks and some "candy dust", which I thought would be good but I didn't like it as much as when I chopped the candy by hand.
-if you have gooey candy, like Caramilk bars, you can freeze them before chopping.
-Don't let the oozing candy goodness fool you into thinking the muffins aren't done. With my first batch, I glanced & thought the melted bits were raw batter, so I kept cooking and ended up with dried out muffins. Still tasty, but take 2 was better:

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