The other day, my friend/co-worker Heidi sent me a grilled cheese slide show. She obviously knows me very well. This came shortly after Isabel told me she had received her first copy of Sunset magazine in  the mail and that Tyler Florence is all over it. Those two things together led me to realize Sunset magazine is clearly awesome. Plus it is about my home region of the country, the West. So I started poking around the website and found another exciting recipe slide show — for apples.

I want to make nearly every thing in the apple slideshow (I will do a post on the raw spiced applesauce soon), but I started with the apple corn muffins. I used Fuji apples.

You know how some people can peel an apple in one long spiral, using a knife? I am not one of those people. I used my slicer and then cut the peel off each slice, but it would have been a better idea to peel it with my vegetable peeler before slicing.

I think I left the butter in the skillet too long before putting the brown sugar in, so some of it evaporated. I ended up adding about a teaspoon more of butter so the brown sugar would melt. Cinnamon would be a good addition to this mixture.

The original recipe doesn’t say how thin to slice the apples, so I just used the size that results from using my apple slicer (10 slices). But having made them, I would suggest slicing them thinner — maybe 20 slices per Fuji apple. That way, you will have more apple slices per muffin.

If you have ever made or seen a pineapple upside down cake, these are a similar concept. You put the gooey apple yumminess on the bottom and the batter on top, then remove them from the pan and serve upside down.

I am apparently all about cornmeal lately. Not sure why.

Oh, one more thing about these muffins: They are glorious, but you should probably only bake them if you are going to eat them all that day. They get a little weird and drippy after the first day.

Upside-down apple corn muffins (Adapted slightly from Sunset)
1/4 cup butter
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 pound sweet apples (I used 3 Fujis)
1 cup yellow cornmeal
1 cup all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk
1 large egg
3 tablespoons oil (I used canola)

Preheat oven to 350. Rinse, peel, core and cut the apples into thin slices. Butter a muffin pan.

Melt butter in a skillet or frying pan over moderately low heat. Stir in brown sugar until dissolved and bubbly*. Stir in apples and cook for about 5 minutes, until they are slightly tender when poked with a fork. Divide the apple and brown sugar mixture equally among the 12 buttered muffin cups.

In a medium bowl, stir together cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking soda and salt. In a small bowl (or measuring cup) mix buttermilk, egg and oil to blend. Stir into cornmeal mixture just until blended. Carefully spoon the batter equally into muffin cups on top of the apples.

Bake in at 350 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes, until tops are lightly browned and feel firm with pressed lightly. Remove from muffin tin with a fork (or run a knife around each and invert the whole thing onto a baking sheet), replacing any apples that stick to the pan. Serve warm or at room temperature.

 

*My brown sugar wasn’t completely melting, so I added another tablespoon of butter.