Gingerbread muffins

 

Gingerbread in muffin form that you can make ahead? I wanted these muffins to be a candidate for inclusion in the cartoon, "Breakfast at Epiphany's.

Gingerbread muffins
Adapted from “365 Ways to Prepare for Christmas” by David E. Monn

Ingredients

½ teaspoon baking soda

¼ cup buttermilk

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon ground ginger

¾ teaspoon cinnamon

¼ teaspoon allspice

¼ teaspoon cloves

⅜ cup solid shortening

¼ cup sugar

¼ cup packed dark brown sugar

1 egg

¼ cup dark corn syrup

Method
Stir baking soda into buttermilk to dissolve. Set aside. Whisk together flour, ginger, cinnamon, allspice and cloves together in a small bowl. Set aside.

In a mixing bowl, beat shortening and sugars together until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add egg and beat well. Mix in corn syrup. Add flour and buttermilk mixtures alternately, beating well after each addition. Cover and refrigerate for 24 hours or up to 2 days.

Preheat oven to 350. Prepare a standard 12-cup muffin tin. Spoon batter into muffin cups about ⅔ cup full. (I found a 2-tablespoon measuring spoon worked pretty well.) Bake until they pass the toothpick test, about 20 to 25 minutes.

Note: The original recipe was designed to make 24 muffins, so obviously these can be doubled.

Rating: These taste like a wimpy gingerbread. It's not that they don't taste good, it's just that they really don't deliver the same punch as gingerbread does, so they were somewhat disappointing. Still great to wake up to muffins you can just quickly bake off, but it seriously made me wonder if my spices were too old, until I remembered that I'd just opened a fresh jar of ginger and I'd made other things recently where you could detect the spices just fine. Not sure why that's the case with this recipe, but it mainly just made me wish I'd made gingerbread. But I didn't have to get up as early this way, so that's a win.