So awhile back, I made a bunch of Steel Cut Oatmeal in my Instant Pot, looking for just the right combination of time & ingredients to get my Best Instant Pot Oatmeal. And I love oatmeal and ate a lot, but still had some leftover! So I made a few things with it. Some cookies that were a total fail, a little experiment with a copycat Taco Bell meat recipe (yuck!) and these Leftover Oatmeal Muffins. Well, the third time was a charm.

Leftover Oatmeal Muffins

I like these muffins a lot. I can’t say I loved them; they weren’t my perfect and gorgeous Big, Beautiful Muffins by any means, but Leftover Oatmeal Muffins are easy, tasty (and frugal) and pretty healthy and taste a bit like Snickerdoodles. That’s the Cinnamon Sugar on top, for sure, doing its thing, and I do love me some snickerdoodles!

About Leftover Oatmeal Muffins:

It’s been a while since I made that Best Instant Pot Steel Cut Oatmeal and started on my series of experiments. That oatmeal seemed to go on forever! And then I’ve been agonizing over whether or not to post these muffins, and here’s why. I thought the oatmeal might act a little like applesauce in the muffins, which would mean they’d be moist, but still have a lighter texture.

Instead, the oatmeal made the muffins a little heavy & denser and even with a whopping 4 teaspoons of baking soda, they were still a little “squat” as you can see in the pics. I’d call them honest, plain eating. Being a food blogger, sometimes that concept passes me right by these days; I tend to look for the “best” and most over the top recipes I can find or make up! It just seems more fun, lol! I kind of felt the same way about my Healthier Cinnamon Sugar Pumpkin Muffin recipe I posted last month, too.

The bottom line, though, on my site as to whether or not I’ll post something I make is, “Will I make them/it again?” And the answer to that is yes. But I’m going to make these when I have leftover oatmeal. I’m not going out of my way to make oatmeal just so I can make these muffins if you get the drift. Think of these as every day muffins, not necessarily the ones you are going to make for overnight company or say a brunch party.

Leftover Oatmeal Muffins

Making Leftover Oatmeal Muffins:

The Leftover Oatmeal Muffins are surprisingly simple to make. Just stir the ingredients together by hand and pop them in the muffin tins. Now there is a bit of a judgment call in making these muffins and because the oatmeal you use is always going to be a variable in terms of the qualities it brings to the muffins. Your oatmeal might be made from Instant, Rolled or Steel Cut Oatmeal and might be made with water, milk, or whatever you’ve used. And how thick or dense that oatmeal is before it goes into the muffins is another variable.

What you’re looking for is a pretty thick, scoopable batter. It won’t be pourable. But it also has to have enough liquid in it so that the dry ingredients work in easily; don’t use too much milk or the muffins will be very wet when they’re done. Thinking on it, now, I wish would have taken a photo of one the batches I tried, but with all that moist oatmeal, it’s really hard to go wrong if you pay attention to the texture. I’d say the batter should lightly mound in your muffin tins.

As far as “add-ins” use pretty much whatever you’d like. I chose pecans and dates for these muffins. Any dry fruit or nut or something like a chocolate chip will be great. I’d think you’d want to stay away from fresh or frozen fruit, though. The muffins are pale so the Cinnamon Sugar Topping really increased the attractiveness! Streusel would be good, too. If you’d like to see a lot of ideas on what can be added into or onto a muffin, see my post on Big, Beautiful Muffins.

Leftover Oatmeal Muffins

Saving Money on Leftover Oatmeal Muffins:

These Leftover Oatmeal Muffins are extremely frugal, and not only because they use up leftover oatmeal, but all the ingredients in the muffins are just basic, common kitchen stuff that you probably have on hand. And even those simple ingredients are used in small amounts. Just the one egg, a little oil instead of butter, a small amount (about half that of most muffin recipes) of sugar and just one egg.

These should be named something like Old Mother Hubbard Muffins because even if you haven’t been shopping for a while and your cupboard is bare, you can probably scare most of these ingredients up.

These muffins were adapted from Epicurious. That recipe was adapted from an old Fannie Farmer recipe, originally published in 1918. Gotta love that!

Leftover Oatmeal Muffins

Leftover Oatmeal Muffins

Print Recipe

• Author: Fannie Farmer 1918
• Total Time: 25 minutes
• Yield: 12 1x
• Category: Breakfast or Brunch
• Cuisine: American

Ingredients

Scale 1x2x3x

• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1/2 cup white or brown sugar
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 scant teaspoon salt
• up to cup add-ins (such as nuts, dried fruit, chopped chocolate, coconut flakes, fruit, etc.)
• 1 large egg
• 1 cup cooked oatmeal, preferably steel-cut
• 1/4 cup oil
• about 1/3 to 1/2 cup whole milk
• Cinnamon Sugar for topping, optional

Note: a reader felt better results were had by using 5 teaspoons of baking powder and subbing in melted butter for the milk!

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 400°F, and grease a 12-cup muffin tin.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and any add-ins. In a small bowl, lightly beat the egg. Add the oatmeal to the egg, and mash with a fork to break up any clumps. Add the oil, then 1/3 cup milk. Whisk to combine.

Pour the wet mixture into the dry mixture, and stir briefly to just combine. If batter is too thick, add a little more milk as needed to thin. Mixture should be quite thick but not so thick that it is difficult to stir in the dry ingredients.

Using a 1/3 cup scoop, divide the batter evenly between the wells of the prepared muffin tin. Sprinkle cinnamon sugar on top of muffins if desired.

Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of one of the muffins comes out clean. The muffins won’t brown much on top and might even look a little anemic if the cinnamon sugar isn’t used.

Note: It’s always going to be just a bit of a guess as to how much milk these muffins need and that depends how thick the oatmeal you use happens to be.

Keywords: Breakfast or Brunch Dish, leftover oatmeal, Muffins, Oatmeal

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I’ll be sharing my Leftover Oatmeal Muffins at Fiesta Friday #247, hosted this week by Antonia @ Zoale.com and Laurena @ Life Diet Health. There’s lots of fun fall dishes & Halloween Party food already linked up there! Stop by and check it out.