Honey corn muffins
It's just a recipe! It's good. Idk.
Ugh, I made some really great corn muffins back in december, and because I wasn’t updating the newsletter at the time I didn’t write down what I did. I’m so annoyed, they were really good. I think these are about as good though.
I didn’t grow up eating corn muffins particularly, as my dad was a real southerner, and had strong opinions about cornbread (it’s made in a cast iron, and it’s unsweet, and it doesn’t have any flour in it). We always had one big problem with cornbread though, which is: man, it is just not good the next day. No matter how good of a cornbread my daddy would make, it would be awful stale the next day. You could use it for dressing or whatever, but that’s just once or maybe twice a year. You aren’t making pan dressing on a Wednesday night. This is the utility of a corn muffin: it’s edible on day two (or even day three!)
Now, I don’t mind a corn muffin (in fact I like them a lot) because I know that they aren’t cornbread, that’s savory. They’re muffins, which is to say, they are cake. Because corn muffins are essentially cake, people consistently make the mistake with corn muffins that they do with regular muffins, which is using all butter. Butter is drying and cornmeal is always already like trying to eat the desert. You want oil. Do not be tempted by using all butter, even if it’s what every recipe calls for, look at those muffins, do you see how dry they are? Honestly I used half butter and half oil for these, and I could have just used all oil.
Next, if you’re making a sweet corn thing, don’t just use sugar, use honey, because it has a flavor. You can add a bit of sugar if you want them to be sweet sweet, but you want to use more honey than sugar. A lot of recipes that I saw called for 1/3 to a half cup or both honey and sugar. This seems completely nuts to me, because that’s like…. a lot of sugar for a dinnertime food. I know I said that corn muffins are cake, but that’s like…. cake. So this is my middle ground: 2 tablespoons of sugar, it really seems like plenty.
On leavening: this is a bit of a personal problem, but I don’t like recipes that use a tablespoon of baking powder. I find too much baking powder makes my teeth feel weird, and I don’t like it. You never need more than 2 teaspoons for this amount of dry stuff anyway. In this recipe I use 1 teaspoon of baking powder and a half teaspoon of baking soda, because I’m using buttermilk. The rise was nice, and my teeth are content.
And finally: I made mine with buttermilk, because I don’t keep milk around most of the time, and I didn’t want to go to the store. You can use an equal amount of milk and just use no baking soda and 2 teaspoons of baking powder. I don’t think it matters much either way.
These are nice with a chili or whatever, but also quite good toasted with honey butter and a veg breakfast sausage as a little sweet-savory breakfast situation. They’d probably freeze okay too.
Honey Corn Muffins
4 tbs butter, melted (or 4 more tbs vegetable oil)
4 tbs vegetable oil
6 tbs honey
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk (or sweet milk)
2 tbs sugar
1 cup flour (120 g)
1 ¼ cup cornmeal (190 g)
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda (or a second teaspoon of baking soda if you use regular milk)
¾ tsp kosher salt
Oven at 375.
Grease muffin tin.
Mix wet ingredients together, it helps to mix the honey into the warm butter before the other stuff, this will cool the butter enough that it doesn’t seize when you add the eggs. Whisk dry ingredients until there are no lumps. Add wet to dry, mix until it is lump free. Put in muffin tin. Bake, about 17-18 minutes.
While the muffins are baking, make honey butter. Use the other half of a stick of butter, a big pinch of salt, and, you know, some honey. Mash it together. Look, you’ve done it!
NB: You can make these with milk instead of buttermilk, just use 2 tsp of baking powder and no baking soda.
To me this makes a muffin that is plenty sweet. Lots of recipes call for more sugar though. If you like a more sweet muffin, you can add up to a half a cup of sugar, not that I, you know, would, that seems really excessive.