this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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Pro tip for baking modern American recipes is you can cut about 1/3 of the sugar no problem, up to 1/2 on some recipes. Bran goes really well with blueberries. The blueberry muffins I make are basically lightly sweetened wheat bread and they slap. Muffins are a quick bread but somewhere along the line people wanted to lie to themselves and eat cupcakes while pretending they're still muffins
It may be semantics but I do not consider muffins to be cake, that would make it a cupcake. Muffins are closer to quick bread to the point where any quick bread recipes I have tried work as muffins with no changes to ingredients only cooking time. For sure if you cut too much sugar out of something you lose structure but that's why I specified American recipes. They generally have way more sugar than what's necessary for structure and there's a lot of wiggle room with how much you can take out
Quick bread isn't the same as bread... Although I am seeing that cakes can be considered a type of quick bread so again I think this might largely be related to semantics. Things like banana bread, corn bread, biscuits, zucchini bread, are all quick breads that work as muffins and can have greatly reduced sugar without damaging their structure. The wheat and bran blueberry muffins I make are similar to sweetened wheat bread in flavor but texturally they're like a dense muffin. I'm not using gluten and yeast for the structure they use other leavening agents which is why they're a quick bread. My substitutions are: Less sugar, use whole wheat flour, sub some flour with bran and wheat germ. No I don't have any dietary restrictions
Edit to add: Also muffins don't have to be sweet like at all. There are plenty of savory muffin recipes that have little to no sugar, because they're a type of quick bread not specifically cake
I already said that I don't have dietary restrictions also biscuits are typically referred to as being made with biscuit dough, not biscuit batter (at least where I'm from). I think discussing the differences between a dough and a batter in this context though is straying too far from what we're actually talking about so I don't particularly want to get into that.
I don't understand why you're putting quick bread in quotes so I'm asking sincerely do you not know what I mean when I say quick bread? As in something that's "leavened with a chemical agent rather than a biological one" such as baking soda/powder instead of yeast? Because this includes cake (and brownies and cookies even), I will change my case to be more like: Most people I've met in the US aren't wrong when they say they like muffins but it would be more specific to say they want cupcakes. In my opinion, we often put enough sugar into the muffins to cross the line into cupcake territory. Since they're both quick breads I'd argue cupcakes are muffins but not all muffins are cupcakes.
It's like my roommate kept telling me they like pancakes and so I'd make pancakes and they didn't like them because they were too thick. By the time I had thinned the recipe down enough for their liking I was actually making crepes, which are a type of pancake. They weren't wrong by saying they like pancakes but they would have been better off just admitting they actually like crepes and not what is generally thought of when someone says pancake.
I'm not trying to say that if you reduce sugar it is unchanged. I am saying that quick breads are very lenient with how much sugar can go in them while still maintaining good mouth feel, especially when the recipe already has a considerable amount of sugar as do many recipes that cater to modern US sugar addiction.
That's not as much a difference as one might think because the flour too is mainly "sugar", specifically it's starch which gets turned into glucose same as the sweet tasting sugars (side note: it's quite an interesting process since saliva itself containes enzymes that break the starch into glucose and you can actually test this yourself using iodine solutions - which you should be able to get from a pharmacy - which turns starch purple).
Ultimatelly when it comes to nutrition, you should care mainly about carbohydrates in general (which includes all the stuff that is not sweet tasting but gets turned into glucose by the human body) rather than sugars specifically.
Once you look at it this way you'll find out that a ton of stuff which is not sweet is none the less rich in "sugars", namelly things like bread, pasta, polished rice and so on.