Baked Sunday Mornings: Lemon Pistachio Cornmeal Muffins

SPECIAL BAKER, HONEY AND HER PISTACHIO MUFFINS

One of my pleasures is spending every Wednesday with Honey.  She's been my Baked buddy from the beginning.  Starting out as a propped up baby in a high chair, she is now my special helper who will turn 3 in less than two months.

Honey loves nuts, and pistachios are a favorite. She can dump ingredients into a bowl, whisk the dry ingredients, stir the wet, and fold them all together.  And she can do the decorating.  All the pistachio pieces on the muffin tops are by Honey.

Honey loves to be the taster.  She also likes to touch, and smell, and taste our food, and she always loves to take whatever we bake home to Daddy.

Today's pistachio muffins are delicious with our few changes.  We've had a killer cold spell this past week.  I had picked tangerines for my family before losing them all, so we chose to zest and juice a tangerine instead of lemon.  I'm sure the lemon users are happy, but  the tangerine was a great choice!

And we chose to use blue corn meal rather than yellow.  Thinking of Honey, I thought our muffins might be more colorfully  blue,  but, whatever the color, the taste was great!

YUM!  FRIED IN BROWNED BUTTER

The last change we made was to use salted, shelled pistachios.  I had a large bag of this variety that can be purchased at Costco or Sam's in my pantry.  Because they are salted, I omitted the salt in the recipe and the combination was just right...and we liked the flavorful salty nuts on the muffin tops.

 For fun, we also tried out the Baked note:  We sliced a few muffins vertically, then pan-fried them in browned butter.  These were "absolutely" delicious!    (It's a little scary, but Honey wants to do this part too!)

 

Hope you all enjoyed this muffin recipe as much as we did...it's a keeper, for sure!

                                             Wishing you all a wonderful week!