Long time between posts

Sorry that it's been so long since we've posted. We did make honey corn muffins two weeks ago, but we got busy, and never got around to posting it. Last week, we didn't make muffins. However, since I did promise muffin recipes each week, I will post a recipe for a pumpkin spice cake I made not too long ago, which will work quite well as muffins.

So, first, here's the honey corn muffins:

Ingredients:
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 c sugar
1 tsp salt
1 cup milk
2 eggs
1/2 stick butter, melted
1/4 c honey
1/2 c frozen fire-roasted corn (we bought this at Trader Joe's)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Into a large bowl, mix cornmeal, flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt.

In another bowl, whisk together milk, eggs, butter, and honey. Stir the wet ingredients into the dry, stirring until just mixed. Stir in the corn.

Pour the batter into a greased muffin pan, bake about 15 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

These came out really tasty, but didn't rise well. We suspect that the butter was still hot, and cooked the egg a little, when we added it to the wet ingredients. When you make this recipe, try whisking the milk, butter, and honey together first, then add the egg. This way, the milk will cool off the butter, and the egg won't get cooked.

Here's the recipe for the pumpkin spice cake.

Ingredients:
1 1/4 c butter
2 eggs, beaten
1 c packed brown sugar
1 1/4 c white sugar
2 c pumpkin or squash, canned, frozen, or fresh (cooked and pureed)
3 c flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
3 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp ground ginger

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a bundt pan.

Stir together flour, baking soda, salt, and spices.

Cream together butter, eggs, and sugars until light and fluffy. Beat in the pumpkin. Beat in the flour mixture. Pour the batter into the prepared pan.

Bake for 60-65 minutes, until toothpick inserted comes out clean. Cool before removing from pan.

When making this into muffins, just switch out the pan, and cook for about 10 minutes, and check with a toothpick. We will be posting another recipe later today, once we figure out what kind of muffins we're going to make.

Tangerine Sesame Muffins

Ingredients

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• zest of 2 tangerines
  
• 2/3 cup tangerine juice
• 1/2 cup melted butter
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup sesame seeds
  
• 1 tablespoon melted butter
• 1/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Directions

1. Wash tangerines. Using a zester or a cheese grater, grate the peels of two tangerines. Cut tangerines in half, and squeeze out the juice, using a strainer to catch the seeds and pulp.
   
2. Put sesame seeds in a skillet, and heat, stirring, until golden brown.
   
3. Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, white sugar and tangerine zest. Stir in tangerine juice, 1/2 cup melted butter, and eggs.
4. Pour into 12 muffin cups.
5. Blend 1 tablespoon melted butter, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and toasted sesame seeds, and sprinkle on top of each muffin. Bake in a preheated 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) oven for 20-25 minutes, until toothpick inserted in muffin comes out clean.
   

So first, we should give credit where credit is due. We didn't make up this recipe, we just modified it. Here is the original recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Orange-Muffins/Detail.aspx
The reason we used this recipe was that we had a lot of tangerines, that were very ripe and very seedy. There was no way we would get through all of them before they spoiled. We needed a recipe that called for juice. We decided to add the sesame seeds as a play on lemon poppy muffins, and when we saw the recipe, we decided to add the sesame seeds to the topping.
We also had leftover juice, which gave us some fresh juice to drink with the muffins. If you don't want to deal with juicing tangerines, you can just buy juice, probably using OJ.

Here we go!

So, my boyfriend and I have decided to bake muffins every weekend, and post the recipes here. We decided this because we made some really awesome muffins yesterday morning for breakfast. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of them, because we ate them all before we decided to start this. Anyway, look for pictures in the future, and I will post the recipe we started with, and tell you what changes (if any) we made to it.