Allspice Crumb Muffins

Kayte of Grandma’s Kitchen Table selected this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe. She chose Allspice Crumb Muffins. You can visit her blog for the complete recipe. These were the perfect breakfast treat for the visitors we had this weekend. We had house guests and this was a quick, tasty breakfast treat. What a nice coincidence.

People ask me a lot where did I learn to bake. They always assume that I used to watch my mom or grandma bake and I learned from her. In my case, my dad was the one who was the baker. He didn’t bake all the time, but he was the one who made the cookies, and that’s what I started baking. Cookies are still my favorite. My dad doesn’t eat any of the things he bakes, so he has always baked for others.

While I do eat the things I bake, that hasn’t always been the case. So like my dad, I bake for others. The recipes I make on Tuesdays are sometimes hard to share with others. I usually make them on the weekend, when I can’t take them to work. Sometimes they aren’t portable; sometimes the recipe doesn’t make enough to share. These were just perfect. Portable and I had just the right people around to share them with. I really enjoy baking when people are visiting.

These are quick to put together. They take about as long to prepare as the oven takes to preheat. I had read that some of the other Tuesdays with Dorie bloggers had some issues with the crumb topping melting, so I was very conservative in my use of crumb topping, and my muffins came out looking picture perfect. I really like the flavor of these: not too sweet, nice spiced flavor. I can’t say that I use allspice very much in baking, but these were certainly very good.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, pages 16-17