Snickerdoodle Muffins

Beware: these muffins will tempt you to eat approximately ten in one sitting, which would be a Very Bad Idea since they contain something like six tons of butter and sugar. Consider yourself warned. You can blame their snickerdoodley goodness (and the resulting five pounds you gained after eating the whole batch yourself) on Peabody, creator of the original, un-vegan version of this recipe, and on Insomniac Chef for alerting me to their existence and their ease of conversion to a vegan incarnation.

Snickerdoodle Muffins

1 cup (2 sticks) vegan margarine
1 cup unrefined sugar + 2 tablespoons (separated)
2 teaspoons vanilla
egg replacer equal to 2 eggs (I used Ener-G brand egg replacer)
2-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
3/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1-1/4 cup vegan sour cream (I used Tofutti)
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cream the margarine and 1 cup sugar until soft and fluffy. Add in the vanilla and egg replacer and blend well. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and cream of tartar. Alternately add the flour mixture (about a third at a time) and the sour cream (half at a time) to the margarine/sugar mixture, mixing well after each addition, and starting and ending with the flour mixture.

Mix the 2 tablespoons of sugar and the cinnamon in a small bowl. Plop the batter into your muffin tins and sprinkle the cinnamon/sugar mixture on top. Bake for 20-22 minutes or until the muffins are golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Notes:

Peabody's original recipe called for a lot more of the cinnamon/sugar mixture (1 cup sugar and 2 tablespoons cinnamon) and said to roll the batter for each muffin in the mixture so it would be coated on all sides. Sounds even more delicious, but also like a lot of work, so I just sprinkled it on top. My batter results seemed a little sticky and gooey to roll into a ball anyways, so the version above is what worked for me, but feel free to experiment.

Insomniac Chef had equally good results with substituting 1/4 cup cornstarch for the egg replacer, so if you don't have egg replacer on hand, that's another option.