Wednesday Baking | Spiced Squash Muffins
Every Wednesday (ok, most Wednesdays!) I share a baking recipe. And lots of pictures of said baking recipe. I don't call this Wednesday Baking because I bake solely on Wednesdays...no, my oven gets a workout much more frequently than once a week! Wednesday just happens to be the day I share baking recipes with you. All the past baking posts are archived in the Wednesday Baking category, which can also be found in a tab underneath my blog header.
You know how there's sometimes a very fine line between muffins and cupcakes?
I think this recipe crosses the line, sort of like Chocolate Cookie Muffins (which I've never made).
Because really, when muffin batter contains a stick of butter and more than a cup of sugar, (not including the streusel topping), I think it's close to becoming cupcake batter.
So, I don't make these for breakfast too often, despite the fact that they do contain ¾ cup of very healthy butternut squash. 😉
Like the other muffin recipes I've posted, this one is fairly simple, especially if you have butternut squash ready to go. I usually cook up several butternuts, run the squash through the food processor, and freeze it in 1 cup (or ¾ cup for this recipe) portions. I do this by dumping 1 cup portions onto a greased cookie sheet. I put the whole cookie sheet into the freezer and when the mounds of squash are solid, I transfer them to a plastic bag for longer storage.
However, I know you can also buy frozen cooked squash at the grocery store, so you can still make these if you don't have access to fresh squash. I imagine that you could substitute pumpkin or cooked sweet potato as well.
Before you start making the muffin batter, turn your oven on to 350 ° F. That way it'll be hot when your muffins are ready to be baked.
To make these muffins (er, cupcakes?), mix the dry ingredients together. Whenever a recipe calls for baking powder/soda, I like to run it through my little sieve. If I don't, I sometimes end up with little lumps of baking powder/soda in my end product, and I am really, really not a fan of that.
Next, mix the wet ingredients.
Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, and mix gently, just until everything is almost combined. If you don't have a few flour bits peeking through, you probably over-mixed. Use a light hand with muffins!
To make the streusel topping, you'll need butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon.
Cut the butter into the cinnamon and sugar until you end up with a crumbly mixture.
Spoon the muffin batter into greased muffin tins and top with the streusel. I usually make 12 regular muffins and 12 mini muffins, but you could make 18 regular muffins instead.
The recipe says it only makes a dozen muffins, but when I do that, the muffins get so tall that the streusel topping falls off of them and ends up all over the pan. Although, maybe if you use muffin tin liners, that's not so much of a problem.
Hmm.
Let me know if you try it that way!
I should say that I think this recipe makes more streusel topping than is necessary. I think you could halve the streusel and still be good to go, in fact.
Bake the muffins for 15-18 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean.
This recipe is from Taste of Home, and you can print it out from their site. The only change I made was to substitute butter for the ¼ cup of vegetable oil. That, and I made more muffins than the recipe originally called for. And I baked my muffins at 350 °, not 400 °.
Perhaps "only change" was not the right phrase to use there.
Spiced Squash Muffins
Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
⅓ cup packed brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon ground ginger
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 eggs, lightly beaten
¾ cup mashed cooked butternut squash
¾ cup light corn syrup (you can sub ¾ cup sugar & 3 tablespoons water)
½ cup butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Topping
½ cup packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
4 teaspoons cold butter
Preheat oven to 350 F.
Combine the first seven ingredients in a large bowl. In separate bowl, combine the eggs, squash, corn syrup, butter, and vanilla. Gently stir wet ingredients into dry ingredients. Spoon batter into greased muffin cups.
In a small bowl, combine brown sugar and cinnamon; cut in the butter until the mixture is crumbly. Sprinkle over top of the unbaked muffins.
Bake for 15-20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean. Cool muffins for 5 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack. Serve warm.
Today's 365 post: A beautiful kind of mess
Holy cow, those look good! I just printed it off, and added to my must try very, very soon file. You could just throw caution to the wind, omit the streusel topping; and frost them with cream cheese frosting instead. Of course, that would throw them right into the cupcake (don't let your kids see you eating them for breakfast) category! Thanks for another fabulous recipe!
These are the tweaks I would consider:
- Use oil rather than butter; butter tastes better but oil is healthier; since the butter is melted you can sub oil.
- Use more squash and less oil; doing so will make the muffins more springy and less tender (most people consider this a negative effect) but is much healthier.
How is the texture different when you use sugar + water instead of corn syrup? The chemistry of the two are very different so I'm sure there are changes.
BTW, the squash may be healthy but there's only 2 teaspoons per full sized muffin. I expect to make these because I have a lot of root veggies to use up but not because they're healthy. Now you have me thinking - I wonder if I could use pureed squash in the place of bananas, and have pumpkin (or delicta or ...) bread instead.
Um, yeah...my "very healthy squash" comment was sort of tongue in cheek. 😉
I'll have to make a batch with the fake corn syrup again to compare the two!
You may have been speaking tongue in cheek but whole cookbooks have been based on the proposition that making a batch of brownies with a teaspoon of spinach each is a worthwhile endeavor.
Yes indeed...and a lot of "whole wheat" or "whole grain" bread recipes have only a bit of whole wheat flour in them.
At least I'm being honest about the lack of healthfulness in my muffins. 😉
I tried the freezing 'til solid method that you use with bacon this week--worked great. Last week I tried it with a big pack of chicken, but forgot they were in the freezer and left them overnight. In the morning they were already starting to freezer burn on the surface--so beware, if your freezer is frost free it might be worth setting a timer to remind yourself to bag stuff up so it doesn't get freezer burn.
These sound great! I love the fact they have squash in them, I bet they are packed with vita A. Too bad you can't layer the ingredients and squash in a jar, sounds like it would be a great gift if you could.
Those look good. They will be great for the church bake sale. They are sure to be a hit. Thanks. I am off to making pumpkin spice bread.
Something's wrong - either your calc for mini to regular muffins is off or our muffin tins are different. My mini muffins are 1/4 the size of my regular, this recipe shows yours as 1/2. Do mini muffin tins come in different sizes?
I will be making these this weekend, with pumpkin or apples or sweet potatoes.
Hmm...maybe I'm wrong about that, then! I thought they were half-size, but I could be mistaken.
I can say that this recipe makes 12 regular and 12 mini muffins for me, though! lol Maybe it only makes 15 regular size muffins?
I'm sure you can count the muffins you make, so my thought is 15 regular sized muffins. I made these last night. The recipe yielded 32 mini muffins, much less than your version. My guess is that I overfilled my tins - an idea supported by the fact that my topping fell off. "Well drat," I thought, as I took care of the problem by eating the fallen topping by itself.
This time I used homemade sweetened applesauce leftover from another recipe. For the holiday I'm going to try sweet potatoes, a lot less sugar (I'm not going to touch the corn syrup amount because changing that affects wet, dry, and hydroscopic factors), and topping on only half.
I made these tonight, but used canned pumpkin (leftover from your crustless pumpkin pie recipe, which was a huge hit). DH and I have each had one, and they're great! This is definitely a keeper recipe!
I finally got around to making these to use up two sweet potatoes my mother gave me that were grown in her neighbor's garden. It made 12 regular muffins for me. I did the full stick of butter and no oil - in my opinion, real butter is better than the oils we usually find in the supermarket. I drizzled melted butter over the muffins when they came out of the oven. Boy, these are out of this world delicious. Thanks for the recipe!
PS - I'd be curious to know how the recipe works without corn syrup as well. I just happened to have a bottle of organic corn syrup in the cabinet that I used up for this recipe and I don't really plan to replace it.
I was looking around for a muffin recipe that I could use to make pumpkin muffins... I searched for pumpkin muffin in my google reader, even though these were squash I figured I'd give them a try, They are awesome!
For the recipe I used butter also (it just tastes so much better than oil), substituted pumpkin puree 1:1 (since I had some frozen from the fall) for the squash, and used the sugar/water mixture instead of corn syrup since I didn't have any on hand. I also left off the strussel topping since I was making them for the kids. These came out so light and fluffy, just like a cupcake, but have the taste of a yummy pumpkin bread.
Since I left off the topping I wasn't worried about them spilling over when I baked, so I made 12 regular size muffins. They puffed up nicely and came out to be a great size. Next time I may not fill the cups as much so I can get a couple more muffins out of the recipe since everyone liked them so much.
I will definitely try these again using squash, and maybe even applesauce!
Made these again today with some adjustments using sweet potatoes again. I had a tiny bit of corn syrup, and some honey, and some coconut nectar, but not enough of any of them that the recipe calls for. So I combined what I had and it turned out to be only about 2/3 as much of the sweet goo as called for. I used what I had, and also added in one applesauce cup (organic, no sugar added) to keep the liquid ingredients up. I left off the topping as well. The muffins still had that delicious almost chewy-ness this time around and tasted wonderful. I also tossed in some allspice and clove to give it even more of a fall flavor, even thought it's still hot as blazes here in Florida.