It's all about the recipe. Really, it is! I have amassed quite a collection of recipes from my favorite cookbooks and food magazines, and now, because of all the foodie blogs out there, I am adding more every day! I test every recipe I post. Some I've been cooking for years, decades even, others I have cooked just once or twice. I don't post mediocre recipes. I don't post good recipes. I post GREAT recipes, recipes that I LOVE. When I find a recipe like that, I can't wait to share it! And the only thing better than sharing a recipe is hearing that someone else tried it and is as excited about it as I am :) Please, try something! Then let me know if you love it as much as I do! Or even why you don't... Either way, I'd love to hear from you!
I love muffins and I love all things coconut. I can’t think of anything
better on a cool Sunday morning than a warm coconut muffin, a hot latte, some
social media, an old fashioned magazine or newspaper, jammies, fluffy slippers…
This recipe makes 12 delicious muffins. The muffins are dense and sweet, the top is crunchy, the banana and coconut combination is heavenly. These muffins keep well on the counter for a few day. Warm muffins today, room temperature muffins tomorrow. Yes, please.
Coconut-Banana Muffins
2 cups all-purpose
flour (250g)
1 ½ teaspoons
baking powder
½ teaspoon table
salt
1 cup mashed very
ripe bananas (probably about 3 small/2 large bananas)
¾ cup butter,
melted
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
½ teaspoon coconut
extract (optional, but a nice to have. Rather than running around all over town
for coconut extract, I order on-line)
1 cup sweetened
flaked coconut (divided use)
1-2 tablespoons granulated
or coarse sugar
Line a muffin tin
with 12 paper muffin cup liners.
Preheat oven to
375 degrees.
Whisk together
flour, baking powder and salt and set aside.
In another bowl
whisk together mashed bananas, melted butter, sugar, egg, vanilla, optional
coconut extract, and ¾ cup sweetened flaked coconut.
By hand, fold
flour mixture into mashed banana mixture and stir until just combined and all
flour has been moistened. Don’t overmix.
Portion batter
into the 12 prepared muffin tin.
Sprinkle each
muffin with a bit of the remaining ¼ cup coconut and a sprinkle of granulated
or coarse sugar.
Bake muffins at
375 degrees until muffins are puffed and golden, about 25 minutes.
Cool slightly
before serving.
Thanks for stopping by my kitchen today. See you again soon!
Pumpkin isn’t only for October and November you know. I hope you have an extra can or two of pumpkin puree on hand for the other ten months of the year. This isn’t a pumpkin muffin, and it isn’t an apple muffin, it’s a bit of both, so it should please everyone. I like the pumpkin, I like the diced apple, but I especially like the cracked sugar on top!
These muffins stay moist and tasty for at least three days. I’ve never had one around longer than three days, so I don’t know what happens on day four or five. (If I had expected to have extras around that long, I’d freeze them. It only takes a few minutes to defrost a muffin, especially if you slice or quarter it.)
In muffin recipes I often substitute half the oil in the recipe for applesauce. Oddly, it doesn’t work well in this muffin. The texture suffers quite a bit. If you are out of Pumpkin pie spice, as I am, use ¾ teaspoon ginger plus ½ teaspoon nutmeg, plus scant ½ teaspoon ground cloves OR allspice, instead of the 1 tablespoon pumpkin pie spice.
This recipe makes 18-20 muffins. I know that’s a lot. But you’ll make a lot of people happy!
Cracked Sugar Pumpkin-Apple Muffins
For the muffins
2 ½ cups all-purpose flour
2 cups white sugar
1 tablespoon pumpkin pie spice
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup canned pumpkin puree
½ cup vegetable oil (or ¼ cup oil plus ¼ cup applesauce)
2 cups peeled, cored and chopped apple (about 2 apples)
For the cracked sugar topping
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
¼ cup white sugar
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
4 teaspoons butter
Preheat oven to 350º. Line 18 muffin cups with paper liners.
In a large bowl, sift together 2 ½ cups all-purpose flour, 2 cups sugar, pumpkin pie spice, baking soda and salt.
In a separate bowl, mix together eggs, pumpkin and oil.
Add pumpkin mixture to flour mixture; stirring just to moisten. Fold in apples.
Spoon batter into prepared muffin cups.
In a small bowl, mix together 2 tablespoons flour, ¼ cup sugar and ½ teaspoon cinnamon. Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Sprinkle topping evenly over muffin batter (about 1 teaspoon of topping per muffin)
Bake in preheated oven for 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into a muffin comes out clean.
Thanks for stopping by my kitchen today! I hope I’ll see you again tomorrow!
My new favorite pumpkin recipe, and my new favorite muffin recipe, just in time for your fall weekend baking: Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffin! Am I your favorite food blogger, or what?! This recipe is all over the food blogs right now, and I am a bit late-for-the-train in posting it (one of the casualties of the lost camera saga).
This muffin has been likened to the Starbucks Cream Cheese Pumpkin Muffins. I think that’s a fair comparison, but I like this recipe better, for two reasons. One, I think the Starbucks muffin cook is heavy handed with the cloves, this recipe has no cloves, and that’s a very good thing. Two, you can make two dozen of these muffins for the cost of buying just two muffins from Starbucks. Yes. I said twenty-four muffins.
Unfortunately this recipe makes 24 muffins. Not that I am opposed to 24 muffins, but I hardly ever need or want that many. I try to have each muffin recipe make 12 muffins, which is usually more than enough for a home cook. I tried to cut this recipe in half and I tried to cut it down to two-thirds. Neither attempt worked. The muffins were dry. The twenty-four muffin recipe is not dry, so you’ll just have to make them all. Invite the neighborhood over! Drop some off at a friend’s house! Have a bake sale! Give some to the gardener or your child’s teacher! These muffins stay moist for several days.
Start this recipe the night before. The cream cheese filling needs to sit in the freezer for at least a few hours, and overnight is fine, before baking. That’s ANOTHER great thing about this recipe. FINALLY, a method that works for inserting a cream cheese layer into a baked goods. Ohhh, it’s a good day to be stopping by my kitchen!
I have inserted three options for the topping of the muffins. The fourth option is to not add a topping to the muffin. These muffins really don’t need a sweet topping. The cream cheese layer, and the muffin itself, are sweet enough. I found the struesel layer to be just a bit too much. Imagine me saying that! Me, a Sweet Tooth Queen! I like the idea of sprinkling a few pumpkin seeds on top (the green ones, pepitas), which is what Starbucks does, but I couldn’t find pumpkin seeds the last time I was at the store. The muffin above has a slight sprinkling of raw sugar on top. I like the little crunch.
½ cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
¼ cup pecans, chopped finely
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
½ teaspoon cinnamon
Alternate toppings: a sprinkling of green pumpkin seeds (Pepitas) or raw sugar
Pumpkin Muffin Batter:
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 tablespoons pumpkin pie spice
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
½ teaspoon salt
1 ¼ cups canned solid-pack pumpkin (or 1 ¼ cups fresh pumpkin puree, drained)
3 eggs, lightly beaten
1/3 cup vegetable oil
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
Directions
The night before: Make the cream cheese filling. In a medium bowl, beat the cream cheese and confectioners’ sugar until smooth. Add the vanilla, and blend to combine. Form the mixture into a log on a piece of plastic wrap, wrap it, and freeze it overnight, or at least an hour or two.
Preheat oven to 350 ºF. Line two 12-cup standard muffin tins with paper liners. Set aside.
Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and spices in a large bowl. In another bowl, lightly beat the pumpkin, eggs, oil and vanilla. Make a well in the center of the flour mixture, and pour the pumpkin mixture into the well. Mix with a fork just until moistened.
Remove the cream cheese from the freezer, and divide it into 24 slices. (I usually cut the log into 12 pieces then cut each of those pieces in half)
Evenly divide half of the batter among the muffin cups-about one tablespoon of batter in the bottom of each muffin cup. Place 1 slice of the cream cheese filling in the center of each cup. Top the cream cheese with another tablespoon of batter. Cover the cream cheese completely.
Sprinkle top of muffins with pumpkin seeds, raw sugar OR this Pecan Streusel. In a medium bowl, combine flour, sugar, pecans, butter and cinnamon. Sprinkle some of the pecan streusel on top of each muffin.
Place muffins in a preheated oven and bake until golden, about 20 to 25 minutes. Cool on wire racks. Muffins should be served at room temperature. Hot cream cheese is really not very appetizing.
Happy Fall! Go on, bake a batch of these, enjoy them with your family, friends and neighbors. Here’s a picture of my grandson enjoying his. He loves his Grandma’s muffins <3
I bought a bag of over-ripe bananas about a week ago. They weren’t that ripe at the time. I was going to make banana cream pie with them, but then all the kids left and there was no one here to eat banana cream pie, except me, and I am having a hard enough time fitting into my pants as it is. Then the banana bag ripped and rapidly blackening bananas cascaded over my counter space. There was nothing to do but start baking. I started on banana muffins last night, two kinds. These crumbly topped ones are delicious, and they are still moist and yummy the morning-after. In fact, they are so good that I just dropped off half a dozen at my doctor’s office… I’ve got my fingers crossed that there will be a rapid return on my investment…
Crumbly Topped Banana Muffins
For Muffin
1 1/2 cups flour
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 cups of mashed banana (that was only 3 of the ones on my counter…)
3/4 cup white sugar
1 egg
1/3 cup veg. or canola oil or melted butter
For Topping
1/3 cup packed light brown sugar
2 T. flour
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1 T. melted butter
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line 10 muffins cups with paper liners. In a medium bowl whisk together flour, nutmeg, baking soda, baking powder and salt and set aside. In another bowl mix together mashed bananas, sugar, egg, and oil or melted butter. Stir the banana mixture into the flour mixture. Do not beat, stir just until flour is moistened. Spoon batter into muffin cups. In another bowl combine the brown sugar, flour, cinnamon, and melted butter. Stir and mash with a fork until small crumbles form. Sprinkle the crumble topping over the batter in the muffin cups. Bake at 375 degrees for 18 to 20 minutes.
Yes, you should definitely make these. Thanks for stopping by!