Rice Muffins

Ingredients:

2-1/4 cups flour
5 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1-1/4 cups milk
1 egg
3/4 cup hot, cooked rice
2 tablespoons melted butter (or vegetable oil)


Preparation:

  • In a large bowl mix and sift the flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt. Set aside.
  • Slightly grease nonstick muffin pan (or place paper muffin cups in muffin tin) and set aside.
  • Preheat owen to hot (400º F or about 205º C).
  • In a separate bowl mix egg and half of the milk. Mix the remaining half of the milk with the rice and add it to the moist mixture. Stir in the melted butter last.
  • Fill prepared muffin pans two-thirds full, and bake in a hot oven for about 20 minutes.
Makes 6 large muffins (or 12 smaller muffins).

 Note: Rice used for this purpose is added hot to the moist mixture. It may be cooked either purposely for the muffins or for something else and only part used for the muffins. Leftover rice should be reheated in microwave or steamed and than used. Cereals other than rice may be used in exactly the same quantity and in the same way in making rice muffins.


Real Cooking
Did You Know?
The marketing trend toward larger portion sizes resulted in new muffin pan types for home-baking, not only for increased size. Since the area ratio of muffin top to muffin bottom changed considerably when the traditional small round exploded into a giant mushroom, consumers became more aware of the difference between the soft texture of tops, allowed to rise unfettered, and rougher, tougher bottoms restricted by the pans. There was a brief foray into pans that could produce "all-top" muffins, i.e., extremely shallow, large-diameter cups.

The TV sitcom Seinfeld made reference to this in an episode in which the character Elaine Benes co-owns a bakery named "Top o' the Muffin to You!" that sold only the muffin tops (see The Muffin Tops (Seinfeld episode). Along with the increasing size of muffins is a contrary trend of extremely small muffins. It is now very common to see muffin pans or premade muffins that are only one or two inches in diameter.