Cream Cheese Coffee Cake Muffins

I know this won't come as a surprise to most of you, but I like to celebrate everything--from a birthday to a Tuesday--with baked goods. When I wrote my dissertation I perfected the chocolate chip cookie, I bring cookie bars to conferences, bake cheesecakes to celebrate good data days, and now NOW that we finally have the green light to open a dog cognition lab (!!!), it's time for some serious celebrating! 

And the celebrating this time has to be breakfast celebrating because--and this is the even more exciting part-- in the morning we are going dog recruiting!!! And while we may have most success recruiting dogs with milkbones, we need their owners to sign the consent form, so... human breakfast it is! I toyed with coffee cake, I toyed with muffins. Then I looked in my fridge and realized that I didn't actually have the ingredients for either. And there's snow out there. Yuck.

So I improvised. And came up with something pretty delicious. This recipe made 10 regular sized muffins and 25 mini muffins, but would probably make 2 dozen regular sized muffins. I did eat a fair amount of the batter... oops.

 

Cream Cheese Coffee Cake Muffins 

Streusel Topping:
1/2 c pecans, finely chopped
3/4 c packed brown sugar
1 T ground cinnamon
3/4 t salt
10 T softened butter

Muffins:
2 1/2 c flour
1/2 t baking soda
1 1/4 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
10 T softened butter
1 c sugar
3 large eggs
1 1/2 t vanilla
4 oz (1/2 brick) cream cheese
1 c buttermilk

Glaze:
1 1/2 c powdered sugar
3 T milk

First make the streusel. You can do this either in a food processor or a mixer. Combine the pecans, flour, brown sugar, cinnamon and salt. Once well combined Add the butter. Combine until the mixture has pieces of butter about the size of a pea or smaller. Stick in the fridge for about half an hour while you prep the rest of the muffin mixture.

Preheat the oven to 350 and place muffin liners (or spray with nonstick spray) in 24 muffin cups. I did half small ones and half big ones since I wanted to sample without being too obvious. 

Whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt in a medium sized bowl and set them aside.

In the bowl of a standing mixer with a paddle attachment cream together butter and sugar until fluffy. If you want you can add in the cream cheese now. I added it as an after thought after the eggs and it made little pockets of cream cheese, which was kind of fun. Either way works.

Add eggs one at a time, scraping down the bowl as needed. Add the flour mixture and buttermilk and mix until only just combined.  Give it another quick stir with the spatula, incorporating any remaining flour.

Divide your batter among your muffin cups (I use a cookie dough scoop for this. It helps reduce the mess).

Sprinkle half the strudel mixture over the muffins, pressing the mixture into the top of the muffins. Then use the other half and sprinkle over the top.

Bake at 350 until golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. It took about 15 minutes for mini muffins and about 20 for regular sized muffins.

Cool completely.

Make the glaze by whisking the sugar and milk in a measuring cup or other container that's easily pourable.

Place muffins on a wire rack over a baking sheet to catch the drips and drizzle with the glaze.

Excuse me while I go sample...