Pesto Pine Nut Parmesan Muffins #MuffinMonday

Savory mini muffins with pesto, pine nuts and Parmesan make the perfect snack at cocktail time or really, anytime.

A little #MuffinMonday history
Food Lust People Love was almost one year old before I joined my first baking group in June of 2012. Muffin Monday was run by a talented blogger named Anuradha from Baker Street. We became friends over the next year and a half that we baked muffins together. Even though she worked full time, her blog was filled with lovely baked goods and she was very active on social media. The first year or so, Muffin Monday had a steady stream of participants but then they dwindled until it was just the two of us baking each week, for more than six months. I offered to help with sending out the emails or adding folks to the group but she would assure me that a work project was about to finish and then she’d have more time.

And then she stopped updating her blog and seemed to drop completely out of the social media circus that is blogging. I can’t tell you how sad I was but I completely understood how sometimes life can get in the way of all the things we want to do and something’s gotta give. I will be forever grateful to Anuradha for starting me on this path. Maybe someday, if she gets back to blogging, we can bake together again. I’d really like that.

As for me, I wasn’t done with muffin baking. I love the ease of the muffin baking method, the flexibility for adding ingredients to a sweet or savory batter, the short baking time and the portability of the muffins themselves. It seemed that the hashtag #MuffinMonday was widely in use on the internet, so I went solo and continued Muffin Mondays on my own for another 73 editions. For anyone who is keeping count, that means 153 muffin recipes on my blog. It’s quite the collection.

The future of #MuffinMonday
This summer I took a few weeks off, as I was traveling anyway, but also because I wanted to think about Muffin Monday and what the future might hold. I decided that if I really wanted to spread the love of muffins, I should open it up. So I have invited a small group of like-minded recipe creators to join me here for Muffin Monday. And since a weekly post is a large commitment – and I wanted them to say yes to the invitation – we will be posting only once a month, on the last Monday of every month.

I hope you all enjoy our creative muffin recipes. Make sure to scroll down to see what my Muffin Monday baking friends have for you today!

I’m kicking this one off with mini muffins that are great to serve at cocktail time. And, bonus, they freeze beautifully so make them ahead for your next party. What better way to celebrate baking muffins with a group again?

Pesto Pine Nut Parmesan Muffins

Ingredients for 18 mini muffins
1 cup or 125g flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/3 cup or 80ml milk
1/4 cup or 60ml olive oil
1/4 cup or 60g classic pesto
1 egg
3 oz or 85g Parmesan
1/4 cup or 40g pine nuts

Method
Preheat the oven to 350°F or 180°C and grease your mini muffin pans with a little olive oil or non-stick spray.

Grate your Parmesan and set aside a good handful for sprinkling on the muffin tops before baking.

In one big mixing bowl, add your dry ingredients, that is, the flour and baking powder. Add in the larger pile of grated Parmesan and stir well.

In small mixing bowl, whisk the milk, olive oil and pesto with your egg.

Fold the liquids to the dry mixture, stopping when they are just mixed.

Set aside a small handful of pine nuts for topping and fold the rest into your batter.

Divide the batter between your prepared muffins cups,  then top each one with a few pine nuts and a sprinkle of Parmesan.

Bake in your preheated oven for 12-15 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for a few minutes.

Remove from the muffin pans and finish cooling on a rack.

Enjoy!

The new Muffin Monday won't have a theme or a necessary ingredient so members are free to create muffins with whatever inspires them, wherever they may live. I look forward to seeing what they'll come up with each month! A drumroll, please, for the inaugural line up:

• Apricot, Almond, and Toasted Coconut Muffins from Karen's Kitchen Stories
• Caramel Apple Buttermilk Muffins from Making Miracles
• Carrot Oat Banana Chunk Muffins from Passion Kneaded
• Ground Cherry Muffins from A Day in the Life on the Farm
• Pesto Pine Nut Parmesan Muffins from Food Lust People Love
• Sour Cream Peach Muffins with Pecan Streusel from The Spiced Life

Many thanks to my daughter, Cecilie, for creating our badge. 

#MuffinMonday is a group of muffin loving bakers who get together once a month to bake muffins. You can see all our of lovely muffins by following our Pinterest board.

Updated links for all of our past events and more information about Muffin Monday, can be found on our home page.

.

Cheddar Mielie Bread with Sun-Dried Tomatoes #BreadBakers

Celebrate the bounty of summer with sweet corn and sun-dried tomatoes in a cheddar loaf with a hit of spicy chilies. This rich bread is fabulous toasted until crunchy, bringing out its extra cheesiness. 

You’ve heard me wax lyrical about summer cherries when we were living in France and how they are my favorite treat when in the States each summer, but I’ve been holding out on you about my love affair with sweet corn, the cobs of early summer, their tender pale yellow kernels bursting with milk and sugar, cooked ever so briefly and delicious just as is. They don't even need butter or salt. I could eat my not inconsiderable weight in those as well.

As I searched online for inspiration for this month’s BreadBakers challenge to use summer’s bounty in bread, I was looking for something that would celebrate my love of sweet corn. But I didn’t want cornbread. I wanted corn bread, that is to say, bread with corn, if you know what I mean. It was quite a challenge to make The Google separate the two.

Corn. Maize. Maíz. Jagung. Maïs. Milho. These I knew from living in various countries but mielie, pronounced mealy, was new to me. (Even better: Suikermielies which means sweet corn, or literally, sugar corn.). I kept coming across recipes for mielie bread or mealy bread, both of which intrigued me. The first because I was unfamiliar with the Afrikaans word for corn and the second because my immediate thought was, Who the heck wants to bake mealy bread? It didn’t sound like a nice thing. Mealy is not a desirable quality. It also put me in mind of mealy bugs. Shudder. Turns out that mielie bread and mealy bread are one and the same and there is no actual mealiness or bugs involved. Some have cornmeal as well as corn, others are quick bread with corn kernels. Exactly what I was looking for!

My lovely cheesy loaf was adapted from this recipe on Simply Delicious Food.

Ingredients
2 1/2 cups or 315g flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3 large eggs
1/3 cup or 75g butter, melted and cooled
1 cup or 240ml buttermilk
 1 large fresh corn on the cob
1 small can (8 .5 oz or 241g) cream style sweet corn
8 oz or 227g cheddar cheese, grated
1 oz or 30g sun-dried tomatoes (store bought or make your own!) http://www.foodlustpeoplelove.com/2014/05/sun-dried-tomatoes-how-to.html
2 hot red chili peppers

Method
Boil your corn on the cob for about 3-5 minutes in lightly salted water. Drain and rinse with cool water. Leave until cool enough to handle and then slice the golden kernels off the cob with a sharp knife.

I cut the cob in two to make it easier to hold.

Meanwhile, pour some boiling water over your sun-dried tomatoes and leave them to rehydrate.

Once plumped, drain the water and squeeze any excess out. If you are using tomatoes packed in oil, dry them off thoroughly between some paper towels.

Chop the tomatoes roughly with a sharp knife and mince your red chilies.

Divide your grated cheddar into two relatively even piles and add a small handful of the chopped tomatoes to one of them. Mix thoroughly.

Preheat the oven to 350°F or 180°C and grease a standard size loaf pan.

Meanwhile, sift all of your dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl and then add the fresh corn kernels and the tomato-less pile of cheddar to the bowl and mix well to make sure all the kernels are coated with flour. This will help ensure they stay suspended in the bread batter, rather than sinking to the bottom.

In another mixing bowl, beat together the eggs, butter, buttermilk and creamed corn. Add in the minced chilies and the chopped sun-dried tomatoes. Whisk again.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and fold until just combined.

Pour the thick batter into your greased loaf pan.

Cover the top of the batter with the cheddar/sun-dried tomato mixture and place the pan in your preheated oven.

Bake for 55-65 minutes or until the loaf is golden brown and a skewer inserted comes out clean. If the loaf is browning too fast, cover the top with aluminum foil.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool down for 10 minutes before removing the loaf from the bread pan.

Cool completely on a wire rack before slicing to serve.

Enjoy!

Have you ever baked bread with corn that wasn’t cornbread? What’s your favorite summer fruit or vegetable? Here to encourage you to bake some bread with the bounty of summer is our talented host Pavani of Cook's Hideout and the rest of my Bread Bakers group.

• Almond and Carrot Biscuits from Basic N Delicious
• Cheddar Mielie Bread with Sun-Dried Tomatoes from Food Lust People Love
• Cherry Bread Pudding from Bakers and Best
• Eggless Rosemary Garlic Dinner Rolls from Spill the Spices
• Garden Herb Focaccia from My Catholic Kitchen
• Herb and Cheese Biscuits from Gayathri's Cook Spot
• Herb and Cheese Grissini from A Shaggy Dough Story
• Herbed Butterflaps from Sneha's Recipe
• Herbs, Spinach and Cheese Bourekas from Cooking Club
• Jalapeño Summer Squash Quick Bread from Magnolia Days
• Mango Kolache from Mayuri's Jikoni
• Peach & Blueberry Meringue Pull Apart Bread from Passion Kneaded
• Peach Pull-Apart Bread from Recipes, Food and Cooking
• Peaches and Cream Bread from Cindy's Recipes and Writings
• Pizza Cipolla - Onion Pizza from Karen's Kitchen Stories
• Rosemary and Garlic Fougasse from Spice Roots
• Rosemary Breadsticks from A Baker's House
• Spinach Semolina Bread from The Schizo Chef
• Studded Zucchini Yeast Bread from What Smells So Good?
• Sundried Tomato Focaccia with Sauteed Summer Veggies & Garden Salad from Sizzling Tastebuds
• Tomato, Onion, Parmesan Focaccia from Noshing With The Nolands
• Walnut Oat Crumble Courgette Bread from Baking in Pyjamas
• Wholewheat Onion, Spinach & Red Pepper Bread from Hostess At Heart
• Wholewheat Zucchini Bread from Cook's Hideout
• Zucchini Oatmeal Bread from Cali's Cuisine
• Zucchini/Jalapeño/Cheese Corn Muffins from A Day in the Life on the Farm

#BreadBakers is a group of bread loving bakers who get together once a month to bake bread with a common ingredient or theme.

Follow our Pinterest board right here. Links are also updated each month on this home page. We take turns hosting each month and choosing the theme/ingredient.

If you are a food blogger and would like to join us, just send me an email with your blog URL to foodlustpeoplelove@gmail.com.

.

Carrot Muffins with Cream Cheese Glaze #MuffinMonday

These delicious carrot muffins have all the flavor of tender carrot cake but are made with the two-bowl method traditional for muffins and are topped with generous lashing of sweetened cream cheese. 

A great Easter breakfast or brunch idea
With Easter Sunday less than a week away, you might be looking for a great breakfast or brunch recipe so I thought I’d share my muffin take on carrot cake since carrot muffins are perfect for the occasion. These little guys could also serve as dessert, although they are less sweet than actual carrot cake - a plus for those who have been eating their fair share of Easter candy.

How to make your family happy first thing in the morning
The night before I want to serve muffins for breakfast, I like to mix all my wet ingredients together, cover the bowl with cling film and pop it in the refrigerator. Then I mix all of my dry ingredients in a bigger bowl, cover with cling film and leave at the ready near the oven. When I get up in the morning, I turn the oven on to preheat and prepare my muffin pan. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry. Mix and bake. The glaze can be made ahead of time as well and refrigerated. This prep ahead method particularly handy on holidays or even on busy school mornings when everyone is trying to get out of the house on time. After all, muffins are fabulously portable.

Or mix and bake them right away. If you've been craving carrot cake, that might be the best plan.

Ingredients
For the muffins:
8 oz or 225g carrots – weight before peeling and cutting off stem ends
2 cups or 250g flour
3/4 cup or 170g sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1/2 cup or 115g butter, melted and cooled
2/3 cup or 160ml milk

For the cream cheese glaze:
1/4 cup or 65g cream cheese spread, at room temperature
1/4 cup or about 30g powdered sugar
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1-2 teaspoons milk

Method
Peel your carrots and cut them into short lengths. Discard the green stem ends if any. Boil until tender then drain. Mash with a potato masher until fairly smooth.  Set aside to cool.

Preheat your oven to 350°f or 180°C and prepare a 12-cup muffin pan by greasing it or lining it with paper muffin cups.

In a large mixing bowl, combine your flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon and salt.

In a small bowl, combine the eggs, melted butter, cooled mashed carrots and milk.  Mix thoroughly.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir until just mixed.

Divide the thick batter between the muffin cups in your prepared pan.

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden and a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Remove from the oven and cool completely on a wire rack.

To make the glaze, mix the cream cheese spread with the powdered sugar, vanilla and one teaspoon of milk. Stir well. Add the second teaspoon of milk if necessary to get a good drizzling or piping consistency, depending on how you want to apply it. Make it thinner for drizzling, thicker for piping.

When your muffins are cool, drizzle or pipe on the cream cheese glaze. I used a plastic bag with the corner cut off.

Enjoy!

Pin it!

Christmas Stocking Candy Muffins #MuffinMonday

These muffins are the perfect use for the Christmas stocking candy you’ve got hanging around and subverting your vows to make better food choices in the New Year. Now you can eat candy with impunity and call it breakfast. Let’s just pretend you don’t already. :)

When I was growing up, Santa came and filled our stockings on New Year’s Eve. I have no idea how my parents got us to believe that Santa came by twice, but that was the way it was. I was a trusting child. What a stocking on New Year’s Eve meant was children with candy and little toys to keep them quiet on New Year’s Day, I’m guessing, when the grownups were no doubt wanting to sleep in and sleep off the late night bubbly. In my husband’s family, Father Christmas left your stocking on the foot of your bed as you slept on Christmas Eve. Children were supposed to wake up on Christmas Day and explore the stockings before coming in to disturb their parents. Same objective, different days. For our girls, we went with option 2.

When they were little, I tried to balance the candy out with more little toys but as they’ve gotten older, there seems to be more candy than stuff. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, until they leave and I’ve got a great big bowl of Christmas stocking candy leftovers. Why do they not take it with them? Excellent question and one I cannot answer for you. I’ve been giving it away right and left. But there is STILL candy in the bowl, so something had to be done. And that something is muffins.

By all means, keep your favorites out. You will notice that there is not a single Butterfinger in there, for instance, although Butterfingers would be superb chopped up in a muffin. And that is because I have already eaten them all. Those are my favorites and they go first. Chop the rest up and let’s make muffins!

A small selection of leftovers

Ingredients
2 cups or 250g flour
3/4 cup or 150g sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup or 240ml milk
1/2 cup or 120ml canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 large eggs
1 generous cup, roughly chopped, or about 200g random leftover Christmas stocking candy

Method
Preheat oven to 350°F or 180°C and generously grease cups of your 12-cup muffin pan or line them with paper liners.

Mix flour, sugar, baking powder and salt together in a large mixing bowl.

Whisk together milk, oil, vanilla and eggs in another smaller bowl.

Add all the milk/egg mixture to the dry ingredients.

Gently fold until dry ingredients are just moistened.  Now fold in your chopped candy.

Divide your batter evenly between the 12 muffin cups in your prepared pan.  Bake for 20-25 minutes in your preheated oven or until the muffins are golden.

Remove from oven and let cool for a few minutes before removing the muffins from the pan. Cool completely on a wire rack.

Enjoy!

Empty stockings but full muffins!

When does Santa come, if at all, to your house? Do you have a favorite candy that you hope for or hoard around Christmas time?

Dried Plum Honey Muffins #MuffinMonday

These delicious muffins are sweetened with chopped dried plums - formerly known as prunes - cooked briefly with honey and a little Cognac, which softens them slightly and plumps them up but still leaves them nice and chewy. Great for breakfast or with a cup of tea at snack time.

Dried plums are just prunes with a better public relations campaign. Back in 2000, the California Prune Board received permission from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to change the name, citing research that the fruit would sell better if it lost the negative moniker prune, more commonly associated with things old and wizen and past their best. 

That organization has since become the California Dried Plum Board and sales have indeed improved dramatically, a result I figure is akin to the Hollywood studios renaming future stars Marilyn Monroe, Rock Hudson and John Wayne, back in the day.

Salt prunes

As a child, I knew two types of prunes: Salt prunes, which are completely desiccated, salty, sweet and sour, which I adored, and the stewed kind. It was hard for me to fathom that these were even remotely related. Swollen and mushy, dark and forbidding, I avoided the black ones with all the ingenuity a repulsed child can muster. Which is to say, a lot. 

As I got older and more adventurous, I learned that soft dried prunes could be eaten as is, like very large raisins and, although they were still dark and a little scary looking, they were actually sweet, chewy and rather tasty. It was a happy turning point. Turns out soft dried plums are pretty healthy too. If you hated prunes as a child, it might be time to give soft dried plums a chance.

Perhaps someday the lowly prune or I should say, the soft dried plum, will become, like Norma Jeane Mortenson, Roy Scherer and Marion Morrison, as popular as it deserves to be, even as we all giggle at the original name. Here’s my effort to forward that goal.

Ingredients
Generous half cup, chopped roughly, or 110g soft dried plums
1/3 cup or 80ml honey
2 tablespoons Cognac or Armagnac
2 cups or 250g flour
1/4 cup or 50g sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 large egg
1/2 cup or 120ml buttermilk
1/4 cup or 60ml canola or other light oil

Method
Put your roughly chopped dried plums in a small pot with the honey and the Cognac.

That golden color is from my UAE honey. Well, and the Cognac.

Bring to the boil and then take the pot off the stove and allow to cool.

Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C and prepare a 12-cup muffin pan by greasing it liberally or lining it with paper muffin cups.

In one big mixing bowl, combine your dry ingredients: flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

In another smaller bowl, whisk the egg with the buttermilk and oil.

Add the egg mixture to the flour mixture, stirring until just combined. There should still be lots of dry flour showing.

Take out a couple of spoonfuls of the dried plums with syrup to add to the top of the muffins before baking.

 Then fold the rest into the batter.

Divide the batter between the muffin cups.

Top each with a piece or two of the honeyed dried plums with a little syrup.

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown.  Remove from the oven and allow to cool for a few minutes.

Remove from the muffin pan and finish cooling on a rack.

Enjoy!

Pesto Feta Muffins #MuffinMonday

These tasty savory muffins are a great use of leftover pesto if you have such a thing. I always seem to have a half jar kicking around the refrigerator. Use any cheese you have to keep the pesto company but I can highly recommend feta.

As you read this, I’ll be back on an Emirates 777, winging my way from chilly New England to already-summer-in-March Dubai with high temperatures reaching 90°F or 32°C. How blessed we are to live in the age of flight, even with the occasional tragic airplane crash. Before I left home on this trip to spend time with my daughters, I expressed this to a friend who completely agreed. In the old days of expatriate assignments, folks had minimum two-year contracts and the most efficient method of travel was a ship that might take weeks to get home again so home leaves were undertaken only when the work contract was up. The new non-stop Emirates Boston-Dubai flight takes about 13 hours. You eat, you sleep, you watch movies, you try desperately to sleep some more (There may possibly be some serious drinking of red wine in order to help the sleeping. Or maybe that's just me.) and you are there. See you all on the other side!

Ingredients
2 cups or 250g flour
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 eggs
1/4 cup or 60ml pesto (homemade or store-bought – I used Whole Foods brand 365)
1/4 cup or 60g butter, melted and cooled
3/4 cup or 180ml milk
1/2 cup or 3 oz  or 85g crumbled feta

Method
Preheat the oven to 350°F or 180°C and either grease your 12-cup muffin tin or line it with paper liners.

In one big mixing bowl, add your dry ingredients: flour, baking powder and salt.  Set aside.

In small mixing bowl, whisk the melted butter, milk and pesto with your eggs.

Fold the liquids to the dry mixture, stopping when they are just mixed.

Fold in the feta.

Divide the batter between your prepared muffins cups.

Bake in your preheated oven for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.  Remove from the oven and allow to cool for a few minutes.

Remove from the muffin tin and finish cooling on a rack.

Enjoy!