I'd first heard of sour cream muffins about a year ago while flipping through Z's recipe file, a hand-scrawled collection of xerox copies he made when someone was paying him to bake food many years back. Sour cream mixed with baked goods sounded pretty awful to me, though Z assured me you couldn't taste the sour at all in the finished product and all it did was provide a wonderfully fluffy texture. He tried making me a batch so I could see how awesome they were, but in some awesome ironic twist he forgot to put the sour cream in and we ended up with a pile of bricked muffins that we threw at the dogs.
Fast forward to a few days ago: the 3-lb vat of sour cream from Costco was still unopened and taking up space in my fridge, and I decided to try out this sour cream muffin idea. My good old Joy of Cooking
had a recipe for them, and while I was thinking of what else I could put in my muffins my eyes scanned over to the pumpkin muffins in the next column. I had canned pumpkin puree and the optional pecans... and voila, muffin idea. It was a basic add-wet-to-dry baking process after that (except I failed to see that the batter made 16 normal-sized muffins and instead ended up with 12 giant ones), and 20 minutes later, I pulled some orangey muffins out of the oven.Taste-wise they could have been a bit more wiley - a bit of extra cinnamon would have easily done the trick. Texturally they were most definitely fluffy, at which point I realized I actually like denser muffins. Who would have thunk it?
As an additional baking note, they start tasting weird after about four days when left unrefrigerated. I made them Thursday night and the one I had this afternoon was kind of off tasting, so I gave the rest to Ralph. He's a pretty well-fed dog. Maybe I'll give him the rest of the sour cream too.
