Since I started this week with comfort food, I thought I would continue that theme with this Cinnamon Donut Muffin recipe. I do enjoy cinnamon sugar donuts, but they’re a rare treat. I’m just not that into fried foods, and they’re not easy to make at home. However, muffins are no problem for me, so I couldn’t pass up this recipe.
Cinnamon donut muffins will become a favorite to make for breakfast or anytime you want a sweet treat.
The Ingredients
This recipe is full of kitchen staples like flour, butter, and sugar that are easy to find and inexpensive. I happened to be out of eggs, or I would have had everything needed to make these cinnamon donut muffins. How great is that?!
The Process
Making these muffins was easy and went very smoothly. I did get a touch “creative” (read: lazy) when I decided to use all the batter to make 12 muffins instead of 18. I ended up really large muffin tops, but they did cook in the allotted 35 minutes. (Do they make muffin pans for 18 muffins? I need to look into that…) Anyway, the total time for this recipe was as follows:
- 12 minutes prep work
- 35 minutes to cook
- 7 minutes to add topping
- 54 minutes total time
They were cool enough to handle about 30 minutes after taking the pan from the oven, so I got the ingredients for the topping ready to go. Making the cinnamon sugar was just a matter of putting the ingredients into an airtight container and shaking until blended. Melting the butter was slightly more problematic. Let’s just say I no longer trust my microwave’s melt butter setting. It’s a little too enthusiastic.
On my first try I dipped a muffin into the melted butter then immediately dipped that into the cinnamon sugar. There was still lots of butter on the top of the muffin, and the topping looked wet and clumpy. Shaking the butter off didn’t fix the problem, but I found this method gave me nice results:
- Dip a muffin in the melted butter and set aside.
- Next, dip a second muffin in the melted butter and set aside.
- Take the first muffin and dip it in the cinnamon-sugar topping. Twist it to make sure it gets coated thoroughly.
- Keep a spoon handy, and use it to spoon the topping over any spots that were missed.
- Dip a third muffin in the melted butter and set aside (the idea is you always have one extra buttered muffin), then dip the second muffin you set aside earlier in the cinnamon sugar and spoon the mixture over any gaps.
- Keep repeating this pattern until all the muffins have been topped.
I’m guessing this allowed the excess butter to soak into the muffin and made the cinnamon sugar topping look like the author’s pictures.
