Baked Sunday Mornings: Honey Corn Muffins

I have to admit that I groaned to myself when I saw that the recipe on this week's schedule for Baked Sunday Mornings was Honey Corn Muffins.  I'm not a fan of muffins.  In the three years I've been maintaining this blog, I've featured muffins exactly once.  I happen to strongly prefer either quickbreads or scones if I'm going to eat baked goods in the morning (on occasion, I have also been known to eat leftover cake for breakfast).  I guess this just goes to show that tastes change over time.  In high school, I was a big fan of the strawberry muffins I would buy in the bakery at Food4Less; as a result, my high school nickname (which some people still use to this day) happens to be "Muffin."

Anyway, so back to the recipe.  It's easy.  You whisk together cornmeal, flour, baking powder, sugar, brown sugar, and salt, make a well in the middle, and then pour in the wet ingredients (eggs, buttermilk, honey, cooled melted butter) and fold them in until combined.  The recipe is supposed to yield 12 muffins, but I made a double batch and ended up with 27 muffins.  Since I only like to bake one tray of anything in the oven a time, I baked three 12-cup muffin pans seriatim.  The results were a little surprising.

The first batch of muffins (one is pictured on the left in the photo above) rose in the oven, but the tops were completely flat and they looked like hockey pucks.  The second batch of muffins rose a little more into a slightly rounded top (pictured in the middle above).  And the last batch (pictured on the right) baked into sharp lopsided peaks.  So I guess the moral of this story is that the longer you let the batter sit around, the higher the muffins will rise.  (This exact phenomenon has happened to me before with a strawberry shortcake cupcake recipe, although in that case, the recipe contained cornstarch, so I assumed that the cornstarch was responsible for the batter thickening over time.)

And how did the muffins taste?  I have to be honest -- even warm out of the oven, I thought they were terrible.  Dense, heavy, bland... the light touch of honey flavor was the only thing I liked about them.  Definitely not anything I would want to eat for breakfast or any other time of the day, and so they went into the garbage.  It might be just me, but this muffin was just not this Muffin's cup of tea.

Recipe: "Honey Corn Muffins," from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliatifo.