If You Give a Firefighter a Muffin…

My grandpa Joe used to make the BEST snickerdoodle cookies.  I mean truly.  They were somethin’ outta this world.  I’ve yet to taste another that compares.  Infact, I rarely get a chance to taste any at all.  I don’t try to recreate ‘em here in the kitchen because I don’t have grandpa’s recipe and no one else I know has made any either…at least, not for me anyway :)  When I found this recipe for Snickerdoodle Muffins, I might’ve freaked my freak.  They looked too easy not to try and I thought they *might* come close to a muffin version of grandpa’s cookies

My boys and I stayed up late Friday night baking 4 dozen of these…along with 8 dozen Monster Cookies…and we delivered them to our neighborhood fire station, a few friends, and several strangers.  Little tokens of kindness, if you will.  If you ask me, these were BIG tokens of kindness because I didn’t want to give them away AT ALL.  These were so stinkin’ good I could’ve eaten all 4 dozen alone.  And don’t tell anyone, but I ate about 5 before I packaged them up for delivery :)  The local firefighters were especially grateful.  I’m pretty sure we’ll be baking more for them in the future, but next time, we’ll make a couple dozen for ourselves!!!

 

SNICKERDOODLE MUFFINS

1 cup {2 sticks} of butter, softened

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

2 tsp. vanilla

2 1/4 cups flour

3/4 tsp. baking powder

3/4 tsp. baking soda

3/4 tsp. cream of tartar

1/2 tsp. salt

1 cup sour cream

1/4 cup buttermilk

Topping

2/3 cups sugar

2 tbsp. cinnamon

 

First on the agenda, get your ingredients ready.

 

Add the butter and sugar to a large bowl and mix until creamy.  Then add the eggs and vanilla and combine.  You might’ve noticed I only showed one stick of butter in my ingredients.  That’s because that’s all I used.  I read the dang recipe the wrong way. I thought 1 stick instead of 1 cup.  Shoo.

 

In a separate bowl, combine all dry ingredients…flour, baking powder, baking soda, cream of tartar, and salt.  Mix to combine.

Now add a cup & a half of the flour mix to the butter/sugar mix and stir well to combine.

Now toss in the sour cream and buttermilk and….you got it…stir to combine.  Then go ‘head and toss in the remainder of the flour mix and…all together, now…STIR TO COMBINE. 

If you’re following the recipe to a T, you’ll notice that the consistency of YOUR mixture will look quite a bit different than the consistency of mine.  Your batter will be MUCH thicker.  Mine?!  Notsomuch. 

Grab another little bowl and mix together your sugar and cinnamon.

Now, because my batter wasn’t looking quite as thick as it should have…and at this point, I had NO clue where I went wrong…I went ahead and threw in the cinnamon sugar mix into the big bowl of batter.  It should’ve been thick enough to scoop out with an ice cream scoop and then make little balls to roll around in the cinnamon sugar.  Obviously, I couldn’t do that, so I improvised.  I mixed it all together and at this point, it was smellin’ pretty dang great.

Make sure you prepare your muffin pan with liners.  Apparently they’re just too dang fragile for the cooking spray.  I used the ice cream scoop to plop in a helping of the batter into each liner.  I made another small batch of the cinnamon sugar mix to sprinkle on top of each muffin before baking. 

Bake at 350 for about 15-18 minutes, remove, and let cool on a wire rack.  I STILL had NO clue what I had done wrong, so I tasted them to see how badly I screwed up.  And seriously y’all…they were FREAKING FANTASTIC!!!!! 

If there were a legal form of crack, these would be it.  I couldn’t.stop. “sampling” :)  Sure, they didn’t look as pretty as they were supposed to, but the taste made up for it.  Promise.  I’m filing this one under “fortunate accident”. 

I’ll definitely be making these again…the *wrong* way.  However, I think I’ll try the *right* way first.  I just wanna see for myself if I can get them to look as pretty as they do in this recipe.

These little guys were a HIT at the fire station and one of my sweet friends said…and I quote… “OH.MY.WORD.  Those muffins are the bomb.com!!!”  HA!!  I couldn’t have said it better myself :)