As always, we start with the mise en place. In addition to the actual muffin ingredients — starting with whole-wheat pastry flour and peanut butter — you also see here the confectioner’s sugar that goes into the frosting. Sweetening the muffins themselves is just half a cup (3¾ oz) of brown sugar. The batter is actually not made by the “muffin method”: it’s more like a butter cake, starting by creaming butter and sugar, then adding the peanut butter, vanilla, and eggs, and finally alternating dry ingredients (flour, salt, and leavening) with liquid (buttermilk). For the optional chocolate chips, I used Guittard semisweet baking chips (it takes only half a bag, so I’ll have to find something else to do with the rest).

The batter comes together quite nicely and was easy to portion, using a #16 (2-ounce) disher to scoop into the wells of a prepared 12-muffin tin. I had about half a muffin’s worth of batter left over, which I just ate out of the bowl (urp).

The cooled muffins were frosted with a combination of more peanut butter, confectioner’s sugar, and sweet cream. I had one muffin for dessert that night (see the next post!) and brought the rest in to share at work, where they were snarfed up pretty quickly. (Unlike most of my office baking give-aways, I didn’t witness anyone cutting a muffin in half!) Pretty much everyone liked them; I personally thought they were OK but probably not worth making again.

Nutrition

Even with the optional frosting and chocolate chips, these muffins still come in at a reasonable 350 kcal each. Without the frosting, the cookbook claims they’re 249 kcal, but I haven’t verified this (and I don’t know whether it includes chocolate chips or not).