Friday, May 15, 2009

Jalapeno cornbread mini muffins

**This is not a gluten-free recipe and was posted before I eliminated gluten from my diet. **

jalapeno cornbread mini muffins, adapted from The Complete Cooking Light Cookbook

Who doesn't love cornbread? And to get real cornbread (cornbread that isn't sickeningly sweet) in Michigan, I have to whip some up myself. I love regular cornbread, but I always had a particular fondness for Mom's Mexican cornbread. It's perfect with a pot of chili... or with black-eyed peas and greens on New Year's Day. So I was especially excited to find a recipe for jalapeno cornbread in May's cookbook of the month.

Jalapeno cornbread mini muffins (adapted from "The Complete Cooking Light Cookbook")

3 Tbsp whole white wheat flour
3 Tbsp yellow cornmeal
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt
3 Tbsp milk
1/2 Tbsp canola oil
1/4 cup corn (frozen and thawed is fine)
2 Tbsp chopped cilantro
1 tsp minced jalapeno

Combine flour, cornmeal, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl. Stir together milk and oil in a separate bowl, and then add this to dry ingredients. Fold in corn, cilantro and jalapeno. Oil 9 mini muffin cups (or 3 regular size ones) and evenly pour batter into them. Bake at 350 for about 25 min, or until they're brown and toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Makes 9 mini muffins (or 3 regular muffins).

I have one complaint: these were not hot enough. They would be great if you avoid spiciness, but I could have used 2-3 times more jalapeno. Otherwise they tasted great. They had a really great texture, even without the egg (I left this out because I quartered the recipe and didn't feel that a quarter of an egg would make much of a difference). If you're making a bigger batch, go ahead and add an egg in with the milk and oil for good measure. They didn't quite compare to Mom's cornbread, but it's a good starting point, and adding more pepper would make the competition a lot closer.

2 comments:

Julia said...

I can't imagine sweet cornbread. These look right up my alley... and I probably would have agreed they needed more spice. 1 tsp. seems so little.

Katie said...

Yeah, sweet cornbread throws my brain into chaos. I've even tried to eat cornbread at nice restaurants during "southern night" thinking that they would finally do it right, but was always very disappointed.

I tend to go easy on the jalapeno at first because the ones I buy are usually incredibly hot. In fact, I have to wear gloves to cut these because the one time I didn't, my hands burned for about 3 days. But, I guess I was a little bit too stingy this time.