Food Friday: Cinnamon Spice Muffins

I don't have cravings very often (unless you count chocolate chip cookies but we're not talking about that, are we?). So I was sitting around one afternoon, and I had a craving for some spice cake. Like, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, you know what I'm talking about. It was an unexpectedly chilly day, kind of gloomy, and I really didn't want to go to the store. So, as usual, I went to All Recipes to see if I could find a recipe that called for ingredients I already had.

Unfortunately, I had some trouble. Don't get me wrong, I found lots of spice cake recipes, but almost all of them (and I mean all) called for apples. Well, I didn't have any apples, and like I said, I wasn't about to drive the 2 minutes to the store that would enable me to get apples. I was just starting to get a little bit frustrated when I came across this recipe for "Cinnamon Teacake". It didn't call for apples, and it also happened to be eggless which I thought would be worth a try. Don't be fooled, though. Eggless does not equal healthy. It seems that they substituted butter for the missing eggs, and so it's pretty fattening. Luckily for me, healthy was not part of my criteria that day, so I made it.

I changed a few things, though, because the recipe only called for cinnamon, and I wanted spice cake so I added some vanilla, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, etc. (Incidentally, I'm not sure if the measurements below are 100% accurate - I sort of just threw things in. But it's pretty close, I think.) I also substituted half of the sugar with brown, because I thought it would be a better pairing with all the spices. I thought about subbing part of the flour with whole wheat flour (to mitigate the unhealthiness of the entire stick of butter I was about to consume), but I didn't want to mess with the recipe too much because of the lack of eggs. I wasn't sure how the consistency was going to turn out, but next time I probably will use some whole wheat flour. I also obviously made muffins instead of cake. Because I wanted muffins.

You should definitely make these unless you're on a diet. They are super moist, and really good warm. The consistency is a lot like coffee cake, and it is so good with some hot spiced tea (or coffee if you're into that kind of thing.) Mmm!

Cinnamon Spice Muffins

adapted from All Recipes

Ingredients

Muffins:

7 tablespoons butter
1 cup self-rising flour
1/4 cup white sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/3 cup milk

Topping:

1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon white sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 cup white sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

DIRECTIONS
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a small muffin tin (6 muffins).
2. Melt 7 tablespoons of the butter. In a medium sized bowl mix together the melted butter, vanilla, 1/4 cup white sugar, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1 tablespoon cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, and the self rising flour to form a soft dough. Add the milk and mix again till smooth. Pour batter into prepared pan.
3. Bake at 350 degrees F for 15 to 20 minutes. Remove muffins from oven and set aside.

4. In a saucepan melt 1 tablespoon butter and mix with 1 tablespoon white sugar and 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon. Spread over top of muffins.
5. In a small bowl stir together the remaining 1/4 cup sugar and 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon. Sprinkle over muffins.