corn muffins, à la kenny rogers

I’m on a quest to recreate the beautiful sweet corn muffins that they serve at kenny rogers outlets. I used to eat them by the quadruples as a kid and it never occurred to me till recently that I might be able to churn them out at home.

just as background, kenny roger’s is an american restaurant that markets itself on its wood-fired rotisserie chicken. if you’re american though, it’s likely that you haven’t seen one around you, or even recognise the name since they ceased operations in the US a long time ago. kenny rogers now operates predominantly in asia, as in singapore, and is pretty well known for both its chicken and square (as opposed to typically round) corn muffins.

I think it might be blasphemy to call it cornbread in many parts of the USA, and many people feel an incredible passion for what constitutes proper cornbread. in an effort to not incite any hate, I am calling these corn muffins. essentially a honey-sweetened yellow cornmeal batter with nuggets of sweet corn, it bakes up with a great dark crust and a moist fluffy inside.

the recipe for the corn muffins is supposedly secret, but there are some floating around the internet and the blogosphere which are all basically the same. I ended up using bob’s red mill fine-ground yellow cornmeal, and if I were to change anything in this recipe it would be to soak the cornmeal batter beforehand as it baked up with a slightly gritty texture.

my parents enjoyed the muffins and very clearly did not find the grittiness an aberration, but I think soaking it will make the cornmeal more tender (and if you’re like me, it’ll be less of an annoyance amongst your ohsofluffy muffin). also, soaking corn-muffin/cornbread batter isn’t an uncommon step so it’s not as strange as it might seem. most bloggers seem to enjoy this crunchy texture though , so it’s really up to you!

p.s. have a look at my brand-new ice-cream scoop! I’m such a proud owner – it’s made distributing batter so much easier and I really ought to have picked it up earlier. but better late than never!

sweet corn muffins

0.75 cups yellow cornmeal
0.5 tsp salt
1 cup frozen yellow corn
1.5 cups plain flour
2 eggs
0.5 cups milk
2/3 cup sugar
0.25 cups honey
0.5 cups butter
0.5 tsp baking powder

1. preheat oven to 200C. grease a 12-cup muffin pay with butter.
2. cream together the butter, sugar, honey, eggs and salt in a large bowl. it will turn out rather liquidy.
3. add flour, cornmeal and baking powder and blend thoroughly. add milk gradually while mixing. at this point I would choose to rest the batter overnight before proceeding so that the cornmeal has time to soak up some moisture.
4. fold in the frozen corn.
5. fill each muffin cup with batter till 2/3-full, and bake for 20-25 minutes until they brown on top and/or a tester comes out clean.