Sha Bang's Kitchen: Jalapeno Cheese Cornbread Muffins

Some people call me the Space Cowboy....Oops. I mean some people call these suckers Mexican Cornbread Muffins. I'm not sure if they came from mexico or people just call them that because they have jalapenos and cheese in 'em...I dunno. Shrug.

I got invited to a Fat Tuesday Dinner and this is what I'm bringing. Let's just call these Jalapeno Cheese Cornbread Muffins because guess what? They have jalapenos and cheese in them! BOING!

Here's the guest list:

1-2 jalapenos, finely diced
4 eggs
1 stick o'butter
1 can of creamed corn (the one I used was 14.75 oz)
1 cp of corn meal
1 cp of flour
3/4 cp of sugar
1-2 cps of shredded cheddar cheese
4 tsp of baking soda

Here's my jalapeno. I used one for this recipe because I promised my friend Matt that I'd bring something to dinner that isn't spicy. Our friend Anna (who is an amazing cook and taught me how to make jambalaya) is hosting dinner tonight and she tends to make everything spicy. Like you're going to be on fire kind of spicy. Yay for me. Boo for poor Matt. You can use 2 or even 3 jalapenos or more if your name is Anna and you like everything spicy. (Anna once competed in the BCD spicy tofu challenge! You can see footage of it and her right here! I'm very proud of you, Anna).

Here's jalapeno and it is sitting next to butter.

They are friends and they really like each other.

In a frying pan, melt your butter on medium/medium-low.

When it's all melted (or almost all melted...I got impatient) add your finely diced jalapenos. Add pepper....

And salt....(why yes. My salt shaker is a tiny milk can and I adore it.)

Saute your jalapenos in the butter on medium low so you don't burn your butter and your jalapenos don't get crispy. We just want them soft. Look dancing jalapenos!! Turn off after about 3-5 minutes. Now you have jalapeno butter. Let it cool off to the side somewhere.

In a large mixing bowl, add 3/4 cup of sugar and beat in your eggs.

Here's what it looks like after you beat the sugar and eggs together. My fork fell in while I was taking the picture...that's the dangers of working alone with just your cell phone camera. Don't worry. I saved it. No forks were harmed in the making of this recipe.

Add in your entire can of creamed corn. Liquid and all. All of it. Just pour the whole thing in there, Right there. In there. Yes.

Add 1-2 cups of shredded, sharp cheddar cheese. I used 2. You can too.

Now it's time to add your jalapeno butter.

Mix it up. Now it should look like this. Set this pot of gold off to the side.

In a different mixing bowl, add in your dry ingredients.

One cup of corn meal. I used yellow. You can use white if you want. Same same. Add to that one cup of flour.

Then grab this stuff.

Add 4 teaspoons of baking powder in with the corn meal and flour.

I don't add any salt since there's a lot of cheese in there. But you can if you want. Sift it all together and make sure its all incorporated. This is kind of important. I'm not really much of a baker. I usually can't be bothered to measure things out and mix in different bowls. But I learned the hard way that its really important.

A loooooong time ago (but in this galaxy), I once decided I was going to send my friend Paulie a care package. I decided to bake cornbread muffins because it looked fairly easy using the Jiffy Mix. I was too lazy and couldn't be bothered with separating the dry and the wet ingredients and just threw it all in the same bowl. Well, he called me to tell me got the package and he really appreciated it, but he wanted to know why the corn bread muffins had pockets of dry powder in them.

Oh. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! Okay. Lesson learned.

I just used a fork to sift it all together. Some people put it through a sieve. That's just too much work for me. So fork it is.

Now take your dry ingredients and add to your wet ingredients.

After it's all mixed together, it looks like this and I have to remind myself that there's raw egg in it or I'll start to try and eat it as is.

You can use muffin liners to prevent the muffins from sticking to your muffin pan or I like to just drizzle a little bit of olive oil into each muffin cup. I add more than what's shown in this picture. Or you can butter your muffin pan. Or you can use that spray stuff. Up to you.