IMBB #13 – My Little Cupcake (or muffin)


Alright, I did it. After all this time I finally get to participate in a group blog cooking funtime. I did one, once, a long long time ago. It seems as though I’m always just missing them. Or just too darned busy, usually the latter.
This month, Is My Blog Burning #13 – My Little Cupcake (or muffin) hosted by I was just really very hungry.
I wanted to do something savory and asked my wife to search around for something neat lookin’. She found a handful of goodies and I had planned on doing two different kinds. Yeah well, I got to one of them. And this one would be Curried Chicken Muffins, from Alma in Australia. And they were goooood.


Madamoiselle Crepinette gave me a hand getting my meez together, thanks Ms. M!
Let’s see, where to start. I suppose we can start with the original recipe.
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 medium onions, thickly sliced
3 chicken thigh fillets, chopped (200 grams)
2 tablespoons curry paste (I use Vindaloo)
1 cup natural yoghurt
2 1/4 cups self raising flour
1/2 cup vegetable oil, extra
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons fresh coriander leaves, chopped (cilantro)
Preheat oven to 190 C (380F). Grease a 12 hole muffin tin with butter and oil. Make sure to grease the top of the tin well so any mix won’t stick as they rise.
Heat oil in a pan and cook the onion rings over a medium heat, stirring often. Cook but DON’T brown them, adding a splash of water helps (you want them to stay white looking for effect – so they say), takes 5-10 minutes. Put the onions aside. 3/4 will be used for presentation, chop the other 1/4.
Heat the pan again and add a little bit of oil and the chicken.
Stir until it begins to turn white and then add the curry paste. Cook slightly, adding a splash of water to speed up the process.
Cook for a further minute then remove from the heat and stir in the yoghurt. Let it cool slightly.
Sift flour into a large bowl from a good height to aerate it well.
Add the chopped onions, lemon juice, eggs, vegetable oil, cooled curried chicken and chopped coriander and mix well.
Spoon the mixture into the greased muffin tin and push the onion rigs on top by gently pressing in.
Bake in preheated oven for 15-20 minutes until risen and golden.
Allow to cool completely.
Good picnic food.
Enjoy!
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I decided to buy a whole chicken (cheaper) than to buy 3 chicken leg/thigh pieces. I found myself at El Cerrito Natural and bought a Rocky Jr. chicken. I haven’t purchased one in years, been getting the Martinelli birdies. And I have to say, the Rocky Jr. scared me. The legs were all red from bruises and the fat location was all over the bird. Fat in all the wrong places. Quite disapointing to say the least.
I attempted to use leg meat to replace the missing third thigh, no luck. Stringy & not much there, really. So I tore in to the breast meat. Dice it up pretty small, don’t want huge pieces. She asked for 200 grams, you could go 300 EASY, maybe more.
Next we see 3 medium onions. Jeez o’ fry man, that’s a lot. I used 3 smaller onions and will drop that to 2 small onions in the future. The muffins turned out a bit too moist, thinking maybe the onions added too much moisture, even after rendering them a bit.
The whole onion side of things went just fine. So did cooking the chicken a tad.
Adding the curry paste (green Thai curry paste) to the warming chicken, then the whole milk yoghurt, all fine. At this point yer supposed to let it cool a bit. I figgered that’d go quicker if I transferred to a cool bowl, done.

Next comes the muffin makin’. You just put all the rest of the ingredients in to a bowl and go. Too easy.
2 Tablespoons of cilantro ain’t enough, double that at least. Supposedly, when you put your batter in to the little cup thingies, at the end, go the whole semi-cooked onion rings. I left some unbattered rings on top so they’d brown a bit, yum.

The recipe says this is to cook for 15 to 20 minutes. Horse pucky. These went 35 minutes easy and halfway through, I turned the muffin tray 180 degrees. Why turn? Cause Shuna says so, foo.
The house smelled like curry muffins, it was AWESOME !!!

And here we are, Ms. Crepinette did very well didn’t she boys & girls? You bet. Myself, Uncle Steph & Mama all had a few muffins. Very tasty and had some decent heat. Although, they were just a bit too moist. Not right. Even so, only 3 made it to the next day and those were gone before noon. I hear they were even better the next day, but that’s only what I hear.
So, with a few adjustments I think you’d have a great picnicky muffin recipe to try this coming Spring.
Xo Xo

9 thoughts on “IMBB #13 – My Little Cupcake (or muffin)

  1. my, but those look tasty! quite a turn for the cupcake trend, which i’ll have you know, should be accredited to ms. amy sedaris (but nobody’s talking).

  2. Savory muffins kind of freak me out. Like picking up a huge glass beer mug and finding out it’s made of plastic and you slosh all over yourself. I do like chicken and curry, though. I guess I’d lose some of the oil to dry them out a bit if I were going to take them out picnicing.
    Incidentally, “picnicing” is a freaky looking word.

  3. Hey Nic,
    Embrace the savory muffins. Try one, just one. I got a recipe for a BLT muffin that looks to be very good. Mebe soon.
    Lose some of the oil? Yeah, could help. I used a lot of that to do the chicken and onions, didn’t transfer.
    You would have enjoyed them though, this I know.
    Biggles

  4. Hey Doc,
    These sound great, and I can’t wait to hear about the BLTs as well.
    Wherever did you meet Ms. Crepinette? What a helper.
    Your photos rock, as always; especially the one of the eggs and cilantro waiting to join the mix.
    Cheers,

  5. Leave it to my favorite “meat blogger” to turn muffins into REAL food. And mighty fine looking real food it was too.
    I will definitely be trying these out!

  6. Mmmmm… yummy… I was wondering what you would pull out of your hat that had meat in it!
    Nic – savory muffins are the thing, my dear! A nice, neat little bundle of breakfast (or lunch) to go!

  7. Hey Fatima,
    My wife is at home this very moment redoing the recipe, putting quite a twist on it. Hopefully, I can post about it tomorrow. We’ll see.
    Biggles