Magnificent muffins.

Been driving by this place on my way to work each day. I was super intrigued. Throwing out the word magnificent is a pretty big deal. Their name tactic got me and made me want to stop to see just what a magnificent muffin tasted like. It is the type of tiny whole in the way place, but sometimes those type place do have the best stuff.

Today, I finally got my act together and left early for work and made a pit stop. They had a lot of choices for flavors, but they didn't have my #1 and #2 favorites, which was quite odd. Lemon Poppy and Corn are pretty standard muffin flavors and to not have either! I can't let them influence my experience, but I do feel I would have been a little more happy biting into one of those kinds.

I tried their sour cream coffee cake. It was quite nice. Super moist and fresh.

Their muffins have a square top from the batter brimming over in the pan. It probably has become their signature appearance. One beef I have is that some of the batches were cooked a little too long. And for this reason, I didn't get a Cinnamon Chip Muffin. They were on the verge of being a little burnt on the edges. Not cool in my book! All in all I had a magnificent breakfast and will return for another muffin another day.

Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins!

I have so many recipes I need to back track and share, but today I tried something totally new: Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins (My second favorite muffin out there!)

Number 1 being corn. I will soon make my cornbread and share it with you; the recipe that is. This was quite the process taking me a good 6 months and many, many batches to find. There are far too many bad cornbread recipes out there and someone needs to police recipe boards and rid the internet of these! I haven't made any lately, mainly because I am out of cornmeal. I usually have all the other ingredients, so when I have stock of cornmeal, I see it sitting up their in the cupboard and it entices me to make a batch.

Lately, I have fallen into buying muffins when I'm on my way to work. West Side Market has these mini muffins that are so cute and I just can't resist buying one on my way past the bakery to the registers. I don't know what has come over me; I'm usually more for making things homemade and not spending my money out on food, but I have been more impulsive lately and keep buying them. This must stop immediately, so back to baking I must go!

When I came across this posting, I decided I HAD to make lemon poppy seed muffins, since I had never attempted before. Thanks to Ms. Humble this will not be a trial of many attempts. This came out some amazing! Next time I will make it in loaf form and top it off with glaze as she did, but for this batch I wanted to make muffins to have for breakfast the next couple days and the glaze-like frosting would makes it a little more dessert-like and I really should be cutting out some dessert, not adding more starting at 6:30 am!

Her recipe has measurement in grams so I had to do some research and figuring to find the US friendly equivalencies.

Here is the recipe:

Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins

Ingredients:

2 cups cake flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
½ cup + 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted and cooled to slightly warm
¼ cup heavy cream
3 tablespoons finely grated lemon zest (roughly two large lemons)
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
3 tablespoons poppy seeds
4 eggs
5/8 cup granulated sugar

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter muffin pan (I made larger muffins, in a 6 muffin pan, and the recipe made 10 muffins)
2. Mix together the cake flour, baking powder and salt, then set aside.

3. In a different bowl, combine the melted butter, cream, lemon juice, zest and poppy seeds and set aside.

4. Get one more bowl dirty and beat the eggs and sugar together with a mixer. Beat until they are very fluffy and light in color (I was beating for aprox. 6 minutes)
5. Fold in flour mixture to eggs mixture until just combined.
6. Add a little bit of this mixture to the wet poppy seed mixture to lighten it up before pouring it in.
7. Finally combine all ingredients.
8. Scoop mixture into pan and slide them into the oven.

9. Let bake for approximately 20 minutes!

Second helping after proper cooling:

I can't not try something right out of the oven. I get very impatient waiting for things to cool!