Week 46 - Cornbread Muffins

It was 'bring your mum to the baking challenge' this week. A savoury tasty treat was on the menu with ingredients flown in from across the pond!

My mum was visiting this past weekend because I was singing in a choir concert on Saturday night, and seeing as I had her around I thought it was about time for some mother/daughter baking. My mum had arrived with bagfuls of baking supplies from her latest trip to America - my parents have a holiday home there which is great for me because I can put in orders for food/sweeties/chocolates/clothes and other uniquely American goodies all the time.

This time she brought me back two gems: proper corn meal (for corn bread/corn muffins) and marshmallow fluff (for several whoopie pie recipes that I want to try). We decided to go for a classic tex/mex staple - corn bread muffins. I had a few recipes to choose from but in the end we just went for the one on the back of the wonderfully-named Alabama King Corn Meal packet. Now because it is an American product the measures are in American 'cups', so you might want to go back to week 31 for a link to converting cups to mls/grams.

Ingredients

2 eggs

2 tbsp vegetable oil

1 cup water

½ cup milk or buttermilk (we used milk but I would recommend buttermilk so that it makes the texture a bit richer)

2 cups Alabama King Corn Meal

2 tsps baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 tbsp sugar, optional (we would strongly recommend adding the sugar as the muffins really need it to counteract the saltiness)

Method

1. Heat the oven to 450F (I converted this to 230C) and grease a cast iron skillet, baking pan or muffin pan (I decided to put paper baking cases into the muffin tin so they wouldn’t stick which turned out to be a bit of a mistake, the paper stuck to the muffins so I think we have eaten quite a few bits of paper now!! So I would recommend that you do as the recipe says and just put the batter straight into the hot tins!). Put them in the oven to heat.
2. Beat eggs in a mixing bowl, add the remaining ingredients in the order listed above, stir in until well blended.
3. Pour batter into the hot pan and bake for 20-25 mins or until golden brown. The mix makes about 8-12 muffins.

The end results were crumbly, salty, sweet, grainy muffins which were a cross between a muffin and a light bread. I decided to make chilli for dinner and they were the perfect, if somewhat filling accompaniment to our dinner. They were slightly on the dry side but I think that could be improved by using buttermilk and avoiding the paper cases which might have dried them out a bit. I would also like to try some of the other recipes I have found because they include some more interesting flavours like cumin and cheddar cheese.

Lovely with chilli

Mum dons the marigolds!

It was really lovely to bake with my Mum, I haven’t really done it since I was a child! She is also a really good sous chef and helpful because she’s just a good mum – and does all the washing up and tidying and organising without even thinking! Mum was also my first taste tester - with all her American experience of cornbread it was a relief that she thought the muffins came out well.

I must also admit something to you, blog readers... I bought supermarket cakes this weekend!!!! I know, I know how could I after 46 weeks of baking!? It sort of felt like cheating on your other half but I had good reason. I was sooooo tired after singing all day on Saturday and had a group of girlfriends coming over for a brew on Sunday. Now ordinarily I would have done a double bake and made them some sweet treats but there just wasn’t the time (or the energy) to do it. The lesson from this is... drum roll please... I THINK IT'S OK TO BUY READY MADE CAKES!!! Now that I have baked so many things I would always prefer to make things from scratch but if you don’t want to, or don’t have time, it’s OK, bakers buy cakes too!

Happy baking (or cake buying...) 

xx Linds xx