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Honey-Corn Muffins Recipe
May 30, 2004 | by Heidi | Filed under
Once Upon a Tart, Page 276
The high-rise baking quest continues. After last weeks less than spectacular Blue Corn Muffins, I decided to give one of the muffin recipes from Once Upon a Tart a try. I've made a few of their tarts (here and here), and love to visit their shop when I'm in New York City. Their Honey-Corn Muffin recipe assures "golden-brown, mushroom-shaped tops" when done - amen to that.
The recipe was straightforward, and the vanilla made it smell wonderful and sweet. Whisk together dry ingredients, whisk together wet ingredients - then gradually combine the two. Nothing scary.
Let's break this recipe down a bit. I want to talk about yields, and then I want to talk about the pans.
The one thing I've noticed about muffin making is that noone ever tells you how full to fill the muffin tins. So I've been filling them at slightly different levels, and the prettiest muffins are the ones I fill almost to the top. I don't know what size muffin tins they have at Once Upon a Tart, but the recipe says the yield is 6 big muffins. I used a standard muffin tin (because I don't have anything else), made 6 standard sized muffins, but then had so much batter left over, that I decided what-the-hell, and poured the rest of it into my popover tins to see what would happen.
This is where things got interesting. The regular muffin tin came out of the oven and would you believe, the muffins looked almost identical to the ones from last week, except they were golden yellow. "Wow" was not a word that came to mind when I looked at them. I'm not going to go into a complete kitchen science breakdown comparision of both of the recipes -- but the two recipes were notably different, different leaveners, different dairy, different baking temps. The blue corn muffins had regular flour, blue corn meal, frothy egg whites, baking powder, baking soda, and buttermilk. These had corn flour, corn meal, regular flour, milk, 1T+ baking powder, and a couple eggs. One baked at 375, the other at 400.
Thirty minutes later and the popover muffins are in full bloom, from the exact same batter. They have a least 2-inches on the regular muffins, and have what I can genuinely refer to as "golden-brown, mushroom-shaped tops." So, as of right now, I am in the market for a couple big muffin tins. Big tins = big muffin tops? It certainly seems to help.
If anyone out there can point me to a basic corn muffin recipe that produces beautiful, big muffin tops in a STANDARD (or mini!) muffin tin, please let me know. Now I am curious.
In some of the early entries on this site I didn't request permission to run the recipe I was writing about from the publisher so it won't appear here. The majority of entries on 101 Cookbooks will have the recipes attached, this just happens to be one of the ones that doesn't.
From: Once Upon a Tart Page: 276
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Your Comments
Mamasue said:This is very interesting! I love the look of your "popover" pan muffins. Its amazing that two different pans can cause two different visuals of the muffins. I have a popover pan that I don't use. I use my large muffin tin for the popovers and find them better in size and more like the Jordan's Pond Popovers from Bar Harbor Maine. You are right the muffin recipes don't always tell you how much to fill the tin. I like to fill them almost to the top and make sure that I also great the top part of the pan (cooking spray) so that the caps don't stick to the surface. Now, I have to use my popover pan for not popovers but muffins!
I also want to tell you how much I enjoy your blog. I also love the way you take pictures and how professional they look. What type of camera do you use?
Happy Baking!
P.S. I also have Once Upon a Tart but haven't made anything from it yet! :-)
Thanks!
I actually have a couple different cameras/lenses that I use. For this site, I started off really basic with a little Nikon 990. That eventually broke, and then I upgraded to the Canon 300d.
I'm also having the same yield issue with muffins and it's getting really annoying! Twice recently I've made muffins from Nigella's How To Be Domestic Goddess, that stated a yield of 12 muffins. I don't what kind of tin she uses, but I could get maybe 9...and they were very flat and non-muffin like.
Today I tried in my large muffin tin, and produced a paltry 5 muffins of what I would consider regular muffin size.
I live in Australia, so I'm wondering: what is the standard regular size of a muffin supposed to be??
I would never again cook from a book
by Nigella Lawson. Her recipes don't
work, except in HOW TO EAT, and even
then some recipes are really bad!
She does have a Clementime Cake that
is a wonder. But that is the only
recipes from all her books that I have
liked.
I've actually had the great experience of making these amazing perfect texture with the amazing crust muffins. The first time I made them I was at work (I work in a restaurant) and one of the line cooks told me to try a new recipe from this pretty coverred and interesting name book, Once upon a tart. I took my sweet time and baked them in 4 oz tin cups and then I also had batter left so I made tiny 1 1/2 oz miniature muffins. The tiny ones look adorable and the large ones came out fluffier. I now want to make them and I misplaced where I wrote down the recipe. I really dont want to go to the city to buy the book, although I should. If anyone can post the recipe it will be greatly appreciated or you can email me at my e-mail address. Thank so much and I will too continue searching for more muffin recipes of that sort.
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