Weight Watcher's Cheese filled Poppy Seed muffins

One of my neighbors with whom I used to share all my baked goodies went on a weight watcher's diet. I wanted to thank her for a favor and it was perfect since I had the book on weight watcher's desserts. I decided to try these Cheese filled poppy seed muffins. You see, there are lots of recipes in that book which look very good. But, I don't use artificial sweeteners and many of the recipes call for them. I picked something that I had all the ingredients for and added part whole wheat to make it even healthier.

One year back -  Eggless Mulberry Cupcakes
Adapted from the book Dessert Classics by Weight Watchers magazine
Ingredients:
All purpose flour - 1 cup
Whole wheat flour - 1/2 cup (My addition - recipe had total 1 1/2 cups of All purpose flour)
Quick cooking oats - 1 1/2 cups (not instant)
Salt - a pinch (My addition)
Raisins - 3/4 cup
Sugar - 1/4 cup
Baking Powder - 1 TBSP
Skim milk - 1 cup (room temperature)
Oil - 2 TBSP
Egg whites - 2 lightly beaten

Filling:
Part Skim ricotta cheese - 1/2 cup (See Notes)
Egg white - 1 lightly beaten
Sugar - 1 TBSP
Poppy seeds - 1 TBSP

Method:
Preheat the oven to 350 F. Line a 12 standard sized muffin cups with liners. Spray with vegetable oil spray. In a bowl, combine flours, oats, sugar, raisins, baking powder. Whisk and set aside. In another bowl whisk milk, oil and 2 egg whites. Set aside. In another small bowl, combine ricotta, 1 egg white, sugar and poppy seeds.
Slowly mix the milk and egg mixture into the dry ingredients stirring just till everything is incorporated. Place about 1 TBSP of this into each cup. Top it with about a tsp of the ricotta filling. Top that with the muffin batter dividing equally among all the cups. Bake for 15 - 20 minutes or till a toothpick inserted comes out clean. The recipe says to bake till golden, but mine never turned dark. Cool in the pan for about 10 minutes and then let it cool completely on a wire rack. You cannot really see the poppy seeds in my muffins since I used the white poppy seeds. That is what I had. If you use black poppy seeds, it will look very pretty when cut. I was told that the muffin was almost bland except when you bite into the piece with raisin in it. Then, it tasted as good as a regular muffin. I would recommend you chop the raisins so that tiny bits will be there in every bite to make it tastier.

Notes:
I felt there was too much of filling. 1/3 cup of ricotta should be enough. Recipe called for 4 1/2 Oz of quick oats. I weighed 1 1/2 cups and that was about 4.2 Oz. I stopped at that since I was using part whole wheat and whole wheat absorbs more liquid than all purpose flour.

Nutrition info: This is with complete all purpose flour.
Serving Size: 1 muffin
Calories: 195 calories, 4gm total fat, 1 gm saturated fat, 4 mg cholesterol, 161 mg sodium, 33 g Total carbohydrate, 1g Dietary fiber (this will be a bit more since I used part WWF), 6 g protein, 144 mg calcium.

There are these many muffin recipes in this book - Raisin lemon muffins, chocolate chip mini muffins, blueberry-orange muffins, blueberry corn muffins, date fruitcake mini muffins, banana bran muffins, sweet potato and raisins muffins, carrot muffins, morning glorious muffins. Which one do you think you will be interested in next?

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