Pizza Muffins

I was at a friend's house earlier this week, and we were making a bunch of muffins for her to take camping for the kids, one of the pages she had marked off was Pizza Muffins.

I couldn't believe it. Not pizza buns, or pizza sticks, but pizza muffins. I gotta say, I was pretty skeptical. It had never occurred to me that a muffin could be savory. The original recipe came from one of those Company's Coming books, I just don't know which one. I suspect it had something to do with muffins.

Anyway, here's what happened in my kitchen:

• 2 cups Flour
• 1 Tbsp Baking Powder
• 1/2 tsp Baking Soda
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 1/2 tsp Dried Basil
• 1/2 tsp Dried Oregano
• 1/2 tsp Garlic Powder
• 1 Egg
• 1 cup Milk
• 1/4 cup Oil
• 2 Tbsp White Sugar
• 1 Tomato, seeded and finely diced
• 2/3 cup Cheese, grated; plus extra for topping if desired
• 1/4 cup Green Onion, finely sliced
• 1/2 cup Pepperoni, finely sliced

Combine the first 7 ingredients in a large bowl. In another bowl combine the next 4 ingredients. Fold the wet ingredients into the large bowl of dry, mixing well. 

Stir in the remaining ingredients, if you want to have extra cheese on top (and really, who wouldn't?) set that aside for later. 

Preheat oven to 450F, grease your muffin tin. We tried using papers when we made these the first time, and they just stuck to the paper and didn't turn out that well. So I greased the tins the second time and they came out very nicely.

Fill each tin about 3/4 of the way, sprinkle the extra cheese on top.

Bake for about 20 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.

 

These are shots from the third batch. The first batch was at my friend's house and I didn't have my camera.

I completely forgot to take pictures of the second batch, because frankly, they are that good and by the time I had realized I needed pictures the muffins were all gone.

So these are the third batch. I used a lot of extra cheese in this batch, because everyone loves cheese. I also didn't have any onions left in the house, so these ones were sans onion. Personally, I prefer them with the onion.

For future batches there are a few things I'm going to try. Basically if it's good on pizza it'll be good in these muffins. Also, simply given the nature of the tomato, it makes the muffin kind of soggy, so I may attempt to replace the tomato with an equal portion of already dried tomato. Like sun-dried tomato, which I'm told actually involves drying tomatoes in the sun.

When baking, I will generally substitute applesauce for any oil that is called for. I didn't do that in this one. You probably could, but I didn't. I am considering replacing the oil with an equal amount of tomato paste, but I think it might make them too tomato-ey. And pink.

That's my taste on it.