An Old Favorite: Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins

I seem to have a penchant for cooking on Saturday mornings. (I also seem to have a penchant for the word penchant. Although, every time I use it, I get paranoid, and am reminded of that scene in The Princess Bride with Inigo, Fezzik, and Vizzini, where Vizzini keeps crying, "Inconceivable!" And Inigo says, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.")

This Saturday morning, I decided to go for an old favorite: lemon poppy seed muffins. The recipe I usually use is meant for making bread, instead of muffins, but lemon poppy seed bread takes forty-five minutes to bake, whereas their muffiny counterparts take about twenty. And I was hungry.

Due to a shortage of normal-sized muffin tins, and a surplus of muffin batter, I ended up getting twelve normal-sized, albeit overflowing, muffins, and twelve mini muffins. I was a bit overzealous on the filling up of the normal muffin tin, and filled each cup almost to the top. So theoretically, I might have gotten another batch of mini muffins if I'd been a bit less careless. I was also out of muffin-tin liners. As a consequence, we are really now almost out of PAM.*

* We were only almost out of PAM before. Not really almost.







LEMON POPPY SEED MUFFINS
from Disney's Family Cookbook

Ingredients

2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 tablespoons frozen lemonade concentrate*
1/2 cup buttermilk**
2 tablespoons poppy seeds


Directions

Preheat oven to 350° and grease your pans (one 8-1/2 inch loaf pan, two 5-inch loaf pans, muffin tins [to make approximately two dozen muffins], OR mini muffin tins [to make about 36 mini muffins]). Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.*** In a bowl, cream the oil and sugar. Beat in the eggs, vanilla extract, and 1 tablespoon of the lemonade concentrate. Add alternately the buttermilk and dry ingredients to the egg mixture. Fold in the poppy seeds and pour the batter into your prepared pans. Place on a rack in the middle of the oven.

For the loaves, bake for 40-45 minutes, or until top springs back when lightly pressed (and it is a slight golden brown in color; also, test it with a knife).

For normal-sized muffins, bake about 18-22 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

For mini-muffins, bake about 14-16 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

When they're done, and still warm from the oven, prick them with a fork and drizzle remaining lemonade concentrate (or more, if you'd like). Store loaves in foil.

* I keep frozen lemonade concentrate in the freezer at all times, just for the purpose of making these lovely muffins (or bread). This always results in slight confusion after a few months, when somebody else finds the container of lemonade concentrate while digging about in the freezer, and has absolutely no idea what it is.
** If you don't have buttermilk on hand, or can't find it in the store (this legitimately happened once, though it was around the holidays), don't fret! I learned this handy trick from The Pioneer Woman: simply measure out some normal milk until it is just under the amount you need. Then pour some white vinegar into the milk until it reaches the desired measurement. The vinegar will curdle the milk, and will continue to thicken the longer you let it sit. This didn't work very well with skim milk, last I tried, but it will work with anything else. We had some half and half sitting in our refrigerator, so I used some of that, and it worked beautifully. You cannot taste the vinegar after baking!
*** I never sift anything. Sifting is too fancy. I just mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Sometimes I don't even do that. It always turns out fine.