TWD: Savory Corn and Pepper Muffins

For the past year, Tuesdays With Dorie members have been creating sugary wonders out of the baking bible that is Baking: From My Home to Yours. I've been along for the ride for the past six months. With few exceptions, the desserts have been some of the best I've ever had - lemony blueberry pie, granola cookies that make you wonder what you ever saw in oatmeal cookies, chocolate cookies that I still crave whenever I buy milk chocolate (really).

And while my sweet tooth is in no danger of fading away any time soon, I was still so excited to read that Rebecca of Ezra Pound Cake chose a savoury recipe - Savory Corn and Pepper Muffins, to be exact. I goofed a bit on the ingredients for this one. I normally buy corn meal in bulk, and last week, I bought it from a typical grocery store for the first time. I ended up buying cornmeal labelled "pre-cooked" because I didn't think it would make a difference - I didn't realize that there were even different types of cornmeal - but it did.

Instead of the stone-ground variety that Dorie recommended, I ended up with a cornmeal so fine it was like flour. So my corn bread batter was more like corn bread dough, and that made for a pretty dense finished product.


Still, the flavour in these muffins is wonderful! I've never tasted a corn bread so complex before, with its chili powder and pepper. I omitted the jalapeno pepper and red pepper in favour of minced chipotle peppers, and the smoky chipotle added a lot of spicy flavour to the finished product. I would also omit the corn next time, since I found it more distracting than delicious.

This recipe is definitely worth making, although I need to buy some proper cornmeal next time. If you're looking for a corn bread with a lot of personality, I recommend heading over to Rebecca's blog for the recipe.