Honey Muffin Sugar Puddin' Pie
Honey Muffin Sugar Puddin' Pie
version 1.0
Scientifically engineered to yield the maximum overlap between pet names and baked goods, while optimizing for both literal and metaphorical sweetness. Created by Lillie for Kevin in celebration of their fourth year of partnership as co-investigators in the field of snuggleology.
Basic idea: bread pudding in a pie crust where the bread is mini-muffins
Prep time: like a week. Half an hour to make the muffins, 4-8 days for them to stale up, about 2 hours for piemofication.
Yeilds: one pie
Step one: honey muffins.
Make one batch of these muffins, it will yield two dozen mini muffins. (Adapted from: http://www.tasteofhome.com/Recipes/Grandma-s-Honey-Muffins)
In a bowl, combine 2 cups flour, 1/2 cup sugar sugar, 3 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp salt. In another bowl, whisk one egg, 1 cup milk, 1/4 cup melted butter and 1/4 cup honey; stir into dry ingredients just until moistened. Grease tins for two dozen mini-muffins. Fill with batter at least 3/4 of the way full -- more to get more of a classic muffin-top kind of rim. Bake at 400° for 10-15 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Remove from pan to a wire rack.
The original recipe for full-sized muffins said 15-18 minutes. In my oven with its untrustworthy thermostat it ended up being 12 minutes for the minis. Greasing rather than papering the tins was important - the slight crust is gives some texture once they're soaking in custard. (Also I forgot the salt. And actually also forgot the egg in six of them, I was pouring and wondering why the batter was so thick.)
When they're cool, select the nicest, muffiniest-looking ones and arrange them in the pie plate you intend to use. Put these aside, along with 2 or 3 others that you can use as samples to determine the staleness level. Let them stale up for . . . a while. I did 4 days. Long enough that they'll absorb some liquid, not so long that they're in danger of getting moldy. Gosh, well now there are some left over, I think I'll see how many I can fit in my mouth at once.
Step two: sugar puddin' pie
Don't actually follow these without reading the results below, some steps were unnecessary. This is just what I did.
1. Prep an unbaked nine inch pie crust. Curse at it while trying to patch up the little places it ripped, because you suck at pie crust.
2. Turn the oven to 350.
3. In a small saucepan, warm 2 cups whole milk and dissolve into it 1/2 cup sugar, healthy dash of salt, drizzle of vanilla, splash of rum, dash of cardamom (I have a thing against cinnamon). Lightly beat two large eggs and combine with the milk stuff. Pour into a large bowl with the muffins and turn them over a few times to pre-soak. Watch out because if they soak too long they start falling apart.
4. Arrange in the pie crust and pour the batter over. Then do the thing that you do where you worry about it and make it more complicated than necessary, and take them all back out and cut off some of the bottom so they don't stick up so much, and then also poke into the middle of them with a knife in the hope that that will make the center absorb the batter. Cover with foil with some slits in it. Bake for an hour, bothering it every 10 or 15 minutes to see what it's doing, until what little bit of the custard is showing seems mostly done; also at some point uncover so the edge of the crust can get a little golden, but then also worry a lot about if the muffins are going to burn.
Step three: profit!
I mean, results. Pretty good for a wildly seat-of-my-pants kind of attempt! Well received by Kevin and our friends. The muffins swelled up a lot more than I expected and the bottom crust is kind of underdone. Also the tinfoil stuck to a couple of the muffins while I was pulling it off. But it is tasty and amusing nonetheless.
Variations for next time: I think I'll put the muffins in the crust, pour in the batter, and then let it soak for a while (maybe in the fridge so the crust doesn't get warm) and add more batter when they've absorbed that. An alternate route entirely would be to prebake the crust, not stale up the muffins, and just fill the crust with regular pudding that the muffins are then nestled into. It would be rather less pielike that way, though, as here the batter does get into the interstices of the muffins pretty nicely. Next time I might also go ahead with the glaze + large-crystal-sugar plan on top that I was going to do on this and didn't.
version 1.0
Scientifically engineered to yield the maximum overlap between pet names and baked goods, while optimizing for both literal and metaphorical sweetness. Created by Lillie for Kevin in celebration of their fourth year of partnership as co-investigators in the field of snuggleology.
Basic idea: bread pudding in a pie crust where the bread is mini-muffins
Prep time: like a week. Half an hour to make the muffins, 4-8 days for them to stale up, about 2 hours for piemofication.
Yeilds: one pie
Step one: honey muffins.
Make one batch of these muffins, it will yield two dozen mini muffins. (Adapted from: http://www.tasteofhome.com/Recipes/Grandma-s-Honey-Muffins)
In a bowl, combine 2 cups flour, 1/2 cup sugar sugar, 3 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp salt. In another bowl, whisk one egg, 1 cup milk, 1/4 cup melted butter and 1/4 cup honey; stir into dry ingredients just until moistened. Grease tins for two dozen mini-muffins. Fill with batter at least 3/4 of the way full -- more to get more of a classic muffin-top kind of rim. Bake at 400° for 10-15 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Remove from pan to a wire rack.
The original recipe for full-sized muffins said 15-18 minutes. In my oven with its untrustworthy thermostat it ended up being 12 minutes for the minis. Greasing rather than papering the tins was important - the slight crust is gives some texture once they're soaking in custard. (Also I forgot the salt. And actually also forgot the egg in six of them, I was pouring and wondering why the batter was so thick.)
When they're cool, select the nicest, muffiniest-looking ones and arrange them in the pie plate you intend to use. Put these aside, along with 2 or 3 others that you can use as samples to determine the staleness level. Let them stale up for . . . a while. I did 4 days. Long enough that they'll absorb some liquid, not so long that they're in danger of getting moldy. Gosh, well now there are some left over, I think I'll see how many I can fit in my mouth at once.
Step two: sugar puddin' pie
Don't actually follow these without reading the results below, some steps were unnecessary. This is just what I did.
1. Prep an unbaked nine inch pie crust. Curse at it while trying to patch up the little places it ripped, because you suck at pie crust.
2. Turn the oven to 350.
3. In a small saucepan, warm 2 cups whole milk and dissolve into it 1/2 cup sugar, healthy dash of salt, drizzle of vanilla, splash of rum, dash of cardamom (I have a thing against cinnamon). Lightly beat two large eggs and combine with the milk stuff. Pour into a large bowl with the muffins and turn them over a few times to pre-soak. Watch out because if they soak too long they start falling apart.
4. Arrange in the pie crust and pour the batter over. Then do the thing that you do where you worry about it and make it more complicated than necessary, and take them all back out and cut off some of the bottom so they don't stick up so much, and then also poke into the middle of them with a knife in the hope that that will make the center absorb the batter. Cover with foil with some slits in it. Bake for an hour, bothering it every 10 or 15 minutes to see what it's doing, until what little bit of the custard is showing seems mostly done; also at some point uncover so the edge of the crust can get a little golden, but then also worry a lot about if the muffins are going to burn.
Step three: profit!
I mean, results. Pretty good for a wildly seat-of-my-pants kind of attempt! Well received by Kevin and our friends. The muffins swelled up a lot more than I expected and the bottom crust is kind of underdone. Also the tinfoil stuck to a couple of the muffins while I was pulling it off. But it is tasty and amusing nonetheless.
Variations for next time: I think I'll put the muffins in the crust, pour in the batter, and then let it soak for a while (maybe in the fridge so the crust doesn't get warm) and add more batter when they've absorbed that. An alternate route entirely would be to prebake the crust, not stale up the muffins, and just fill the crust with regular pudding that the muffins are then nestled into. It would be rather less pielike that way, though, as here the batter does get into the interstices of the muffins pretty nicely. Next time I might also go ahead with the glaze + large-crystal-sugar plan on top that I was going to do on this and didn't.