Lemon Blossoms

A few days ago while my wife and I ate lunch, we watched a Paula Deen TV episode about making different foods for a dinner club event.  My wife, who really likes foods with lemon flavoring, was especially intrigued by Paula’s Lemon Blossoms, a lemon muffin with a lemon glaze.  She asked me to consider making those for something we could take as part of a house-warming gift for a party this weekend.  Being the obliging husband (and loving to make desserts) I said sure.

The next day we went to the store where I picked up the cake mix, box of pudding, a lemon, and one pound bag of powdered sugar.

Just before I started to mix the ingredients, I turned on our oven to 350 degrees in the conventional bake mode.  Into the bowl of our stand mixer, I dumped the 4 eggs, yellow cake mix, lemon pudding mix, and 3 /4 cup of oil.  I used the whisk beater attachment and mixed all the ingredients for about two minutes.  The resulting batter is a very thick and sticky yellow goo.  It stuck to everything, the whisk, spatula, bowl, and fingers.  I finally used my (clean) fingers and a spatula to remove the batter from the whisk and sides of the bowl.

I got out our mini-muffin pan and gave it a good coating of cooking spray and spooned some of the batter into each muffin hole.  I was just re-reading Paula’s directions that say to pour a small amount of batter, there is no way you can pour this batter!  I tried to fill each muffin hole about half full, which I estimated was about a tablespoon of batter.

I put the muffin pan in the oven to bake for twelve minutes then I started on making the glaze.  I dumped the powder sugar (yes, I purposely skipped the step of sifting of the sugar) into a medium mixing bowl and zested the lemon into the bowl.  I added the lemon juice, oil, and water into the bowl and stirred it with a large spoon for a few minutes to make a creamy glaze.

When the cooking time was up, I removed the muffin pan from the oven and found that while I had nice muffins, I had put too much batter in each hole, and the muffins spread out over the top of the pan (muffin tops), it turned out not to be a problem.  I turned the pan over onto a small clean kitchen towel, knocked all the muffins out, and let them cool while sitting upside down for several minutes before glazing.

To glaze the muffins I used the same technique as Paula on her TV program: sticking a fork into the bottom of the muffin and then dipping the muffin in the glaze.  The glaze was very thick and quite a bit was covering the muffin and slowly dripping off.  I realized that for each muffin I could not be holding the fork over the bowl to recover most of the glaze.  I quick solution was to grab our spatula holder that clips over the side of a bowl, and use it to hold the fork while the muffin drained.  To make the glaze thinner and flow more easily, I added an additional tablespoon of water to the glaze.

My glazing process was to insert the fork in the bottom of the muffin, place the muffin in the glaze (top down), and spoon the glaze over the sides and bottom of the muffin.  Using the spoon, gently remove the muffin from the glaze and insert the fork in the spatula holder so the excess glaze could drip back into the bowl.  After about thirty seconds of draining, I would place the glazed muffin on a wire rack over a cookie sheet to finish drying the glaze.

When I made the second pan of muffin, I filled each hole with about half a tablespoon of batter, this made muffins that didn’t flow over the top of the pan, but they seem quite small.  I found the best technique for filling the muffin pan was to use a spoon to scoop up some batter from the mixing bowl and using a wet finger, slide the batter from the spoon into the muffin pan.

I ended up making about forty-eight muffin, most of which made it through the glazing process (though some were eaten along the way).  These muffins have a pleasant lemony flavor that is not as overpowering as the lemon flavor in desserts like lemon meringue pie.

While I was busy baking and glazing, my wife came into the kitchen, we talked about the muffin size, and we decided that Paula used a muffin pan that had larger holes than our mini-muffin pan.  I tried making three muffins using our standard sized cupcake pan, but I felt these muffins were too large and seemed to collapse in the middle when they cooled.  We had the video stored on our DVR so we watched that segment of the show and decided that before the next time I make these, we will need to find an intermediate sized muffin pan.

Find the recipe here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/lemon-blossoms-recipe/index.html

Adventures In Food: Author: Kerry Howell