Pecan Muffins

I was cruising the intertubes looking for inspiration and found this recipe at The Girl Who Ate Everything.  It is a great blog with lots of cool recipes.  I needed an appetizer or dessert in short order so I decided to try out the Pecan Pie Muffins. I ended up making some significant changes in the recipe. 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Put paper liners in muffin trays.

Mix together:
1/2 cup flour
2 cups chopped pecans

Set aside.

Combine in mixer bowl:
1 Cup packed brown Sugar
2/3 c butter softened.

Mix together until sugar it is completely blended and a bit fluffy.  (Just like creaming butter and sugar for cookies.)

Mix in:

2 Eggs
1 tsp vanilla
dash salt

Gently stir in the flour and pecan mixture just until blended.  Scoop into paper liners in mini muffin tins.  Do NOT over fill.  My batch made 36 mini muffins.  Bake at 350 for12 -14 minutes.  Check at 12 minutes.  Cool on a rack. 

*** The original recipe warns you that you need to grease the muffin tins so that these don't stick.  That is why I used the paper cup liners.  When I dropped them out of the pans, the muffin cups were soaked in grease.  Really soaked in grease.  I ended up peeling off the papers before I plated them to serve.  The muffins themselves were not that greasy.   I would do it that way again.  I may play with the amount of butter a second time but these were really yummy.  They taste just like pecan pie without all of the hassle. 

*** The original recipe tells you to mix the butter and eggs together.  The butter has to be almost molten for this to work in any reasonable way. Perhaps little lumps of butter are needed to enhance the pie like effect of these muffins, but I changed to procedure to cream the butter and sugar together.

*** I added vanilla and a wee bit of salt to the original ingredients.  I felt they were necessary to enhance the flavor of the pecans.

*** Next time I will lightly press some chopped pecans to the top of the muffins before baking or consider toasting the pecans before mixing them in.  These are tasty muffins (not a one left to take a picture) but they don't have the toasted nut flavor you get from the browned nuts on the top of a pecan pie. 

Leave a comment if you try these and tell me how they worked for you.