Strawberry Walnut Muffins

I've mentioned before that my parents have a farm. Waterberry Farm is a hydroponics farm and we grow all kinds of produce, but mainly strawberries. The strawberries are grown in a hydoponics stacker system using all organic methods. We've got about 6000 berry plants in this year, and we will be picking our first ripe berry any day now. I froze several bags of strawberries last season and I wanted to use them up before the fresh strawberries were ready. We eat A LOT of strawberries. Lucky, I know! With an abundance of strawberries around, I'm always looking for new recipes. I came across a recipe for a strawberry quick bread on Megans Cooking that looked interesting, and I could use my frozen strawberries. In Megan's post she also made a strawberry butter to go with the quick bread. It looked really tasty as well, but I opted to make just the bread. Although it's more like a coffee cake than a bread, in my opinion. Anyway, instead of baking the batter in two loaf pans, I made half the batter into muffins and just one loaf. It made good muffins with a nice texture, although if I make this again, I'll cut back on the cinnamon in the recipe. To me it overpowered the taste of the strawberries somewhat. I think I'd also puree the berries to give more strawberry flavor through out the bread.

Ingredients:

3 cups All-purpose flour

2 cups Sugar

3 teaspoons Cinnamon

1 teaspoon Baking soda

1 teaspoon Salt

1 1/4 cup Vegetable oil

4 Eggs

1 1/4 pound Fresh strawberries; sliced -OR - Unsweetened frozen berries, thawed, drained and coarsely chopped1/2 cup Walnuts, coarsely chopped2 (8-1/2 x 4-1/2-inch) loaf pans

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour the two loaf pans. Mix the flour, sugar, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt in a large mixing bowl. Add the oil, eggs, strawberries, and walnuts. Beat until the dry ingredients are just moist. Pour into the prepared loaf pans and bake for 1 hour. The breads are done when they start to come away from the sides of the pan and an inserted wooden pick comes out clean.

For the muffins I cooked them 25-30 minutes.