I’ve seen a few recipes for donut muffins, but have never actually made any. I saw this one in Nov Everyday Food and the pumpkin part drew me in, so I decided to make them. This was super easy. Just mix it all up in a bowl, bake in muffin tins and then roll in melted butter and cinnamon/sugar. They were really tasty and smelled great while they were baking. The family gave this a thumbs up all the way. You need to eat them with a fork though, because they’re kind of crumbly.

10 tbsp butter

3 cups flour

2 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1/4 allspice

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/3 cup buttermilk

1 1/4 pumpkin puree

3/4 cup brown sugar

 

for sugar coating:

3/4 c sugar

2 1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 c butter

Preheat oven to 350. Butter and flour a muffin tin. Whisk dry ingredients together in one bowl. Whisk buttermilk and pumpkin in another.  In yet another bowl, mix butter and brown sugar with a mixer until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs. Add flour in 3 additions, alternating with the pumpkin mix.

Put 1/3 c batter in each muffin cup and bake until a toothpick comes out clean, 30 min.

Mix sugar and cinnamon. and melt butter. Let muffins cool 10 min then roll in butter then cinnamon sugar.

Now, you know me, I did this all in one bowl. I have no patience for Martha’s methods. I also used a little less nutmeg and allspice and added some cinnamon into the batter itself.

I ended up with more than 12  – I think I had about 18 of these. I would definitely make this again. All the yumminess of a donut with the ease of a muffin.

I’ve seen a few recipes for donut muffins, but have never actually made any. I saw this one in Nov Everyday Food and the pumpkin part drew me in, so I decided to make them. This was super easy. Just mix it all up in a bowl, bake in muffin tins and then roll in … Read more →

Thanks to Brenda at Brenda’s Canadian Kitchen for choosing today’s project, Pumpkin Muffins.

I love to bake with pumpkin in the fall and often make pumpkin bread and pumpkin cookies. The muffins sounded good. They’re made with yogurt and half whole wheat flour. I did not add the nuts since some family members don’t like them. They were simple to mix up. The recipe says it makes 12 jumbo muffins – I made 24 regular muffins with this. Mine took forever to bake. The recipe says 25 minutes for the jumbo muffins so I thought mine would be done before that, but they actually took about 10 minutes longer.

I liked them, but thought they were a bit lacking in flavor. The recipe uses pumpkin pie spice which I generally don’t like. I think you get a better flavor if you use separate measurements of regular spices. I ended up sprinkling some cinnamon and sugar on top of these to make them look nice and to jazz them up. Also – as I was tasting these I realized there was no salt in the recipe which might have been part of the problem too!

I’ll be interested to hear what everyone else thought.

Thanks to Brenda at Brenda’s Canadian Kitchen for choosing today’s project, Pumpkin Muffins. I love to bake with pumpkin in the fall and often make pumpkin bread and pumpkin cookies. The muffins sounded good. They’re made with yogurt and half whole wheat flour. I did not add the nuts since some family members don’t like … Read more →

I’ve got a few Martha odds and ends to wrap up, so here goes.

Pumpkin Muffins

First of all, after I made the Pumpkin Swirl brownies (as reported in October), I had pumpkin left over. I decided I wanted to make some pumpkin muffins for weekend breakfasts. I did a recipe search on Martha’s site and only found one (called, surprisingly and creatively enough, “pumpkin muffins”). The recipe called for whole wheat flour and yogurt, so I was happy that it was somewhat healthy. It tasted healthy too – and not in a good way. They muffins were heavy and doughy. They had a heavy floury taste. I won’t be making those again.

You’ll see in the photo above that I use an ice cream scoop to scoop the

batter into the muffin tins – a trick I learned from Paula Deen. It has to be one of those sccops with the little windshield wiper that pushes it out of the scoop. It makes just the right size for a muffin. Martha  – that’s a good thing!

Butternut Pear Soup

In Cooking School segment #2, Martha and Sarah talked about making cream soups. I must say I found this confusing – cream soups that have no cream in them! I guess I always just thought of these as pureed soups. I often make a pureed carrot soup as well as a roasted butternut squash puree soup. Martha has a recipe for Butternut Pear Soup in the Cooking School book, so I decided to give it a go.

The process is pretty simple. You cook onion and pear, add your roasted squash (she says roasting is optional, but I always roast mine first) and then add chicken stock. You puree it with your boat motor (this is what Emeril calls those hand held immersion blenders and I find it an apt description!). Seriously, this recipe

has nothing else in it. No salt or pepper or herbs or spices of any kind. It tasted like baby food squash (which, I have to say, both of my kids adored the most out of all the jarred baby food veggies!). So I went to work doctoring this. First in went salt and pepper. Then some cumin. Then some ginger. I even added a dash of garlic salt. At the end, I poured in some leftover cream. By the time I did all this, it at least had some flavor. I served it with some homemade croutons and it was yummy.

Blogging Martha

Here are some great posts about Martha from around the web. Got a

great one to add? Put it in a comment!

Martha Moments has great video up from BN.com where Martha talks about her first disastrous Thanksgiving. She also talks about her many cookbooks.

Mad about Martha is doing great interviews with MSLO employees. I also love the study

carrel craft.

Good Things has photos of new Martha craft items up

I’ve got a few Martha odds and ends to wrap up, so here goes. Pumpkin Muffins First of all, after I made the Pumpkin Swirl brownies (as reported in October), I had pumpkin left over. I decided I wanted to make some pumpkin muffins for weekend breakfasts. I did a recipe search on Martha’s site … Read more →