More From Magnolia –Raspberry Cream Cheese Breakfast Buns

When I make trays of baked goods,I like to have items of varying heights. Since I made Magnolia’s recipe for “Shelly’s Cherry Squares”and my Chocolate Goo Bars for my Thanksgiving trays of goodies,I thought some tall muffins would be a nice addition. After reading quite a few good reviews about the Raspberry Cream Cheese Breakfast Buns in my new book “More From Magnolia:Recipes from the World-Famous Bakery and Allysa Torey’s Home Kitchen,”I decided to give the recipe a try. And since the book is seriously lacking in photos,I made sure to document everything in photos (I LOVE my iPhone!)…

Set the oven to 350 and butter / flour a muffin pan. The book calls for “9 large muffin cups”,I 0nly have a cupcake that holds 12 cupcakes. Unfortunately,this is clearly not considered “large muffin cups”in the eyes of Magnolia’s Bakery…so this recipe made enough for 12 HUGE buns in my cupcake pan (with a little dough to spare) AND I filled my cups a bit more full than the book recommended…but you will see that everything turned out just fine in the end

Mix together 1 3/4 cups flour,1 tsp baking powder,1/2 tsp baking soda and 1/4 tsp salt.

In a separate bowl,cream together one block (8 ounces) of cream cheese,1 cup sugar and 1 stick of butter. Add 2 large eggs and mix well (I would highly recommend a hand mixer or stand mixer for all of this mixing!).

Add half of the dry ingredients from the first bowl…

Mix in 1/4 cup milk and 1/2 tsp vanilla extract:

Add the remaining half of the dry ingredients:

You are supposed to fill the well-greased muffin cups only 2/3 of the way,but even though I used a tray of 12 cups instead of 9,I still had way too much dough. So rather than throw it out,I thought I’d be daring and see what would happen if I filled it almost to the top. Whenever I try experiements like this,I put an empty baking sheet underneath the cupcake pan to catch anything that might bake over…helps a lot with the clean up…nothing is worse than trying to scrub an oven with burnt on baked goods!

Next you are supposed to put 3 small drops (1 tsp each) of raspbery preserves on the top of each muffin,and swirl it to make a pretty pattern. I didn’t have raspberry preserves,so I substituted Sarabeth’s Strawberry Raspberry “Legendary Spreadable Fruit”…YUM!!! It is the best,you must try it if you haven’t…even just on a nice piece of toast with butter…AMAZING!

I tried to do the swirling of the preserves into the batter,but it did not work too well for me…or so I thought…because the batter is rather thick,so “swirling”to make it look pretty is not as easy task. So I decided to experiment on a couple,and rather than swirl the top with preserves,I made a little hole in the center of the muffin and filled it with the spreadable fruit (obviously not going to the bottom of the muffin because you don’t want the preserves to touch the baking pan). This is what the two variations looked like:

My final tray of Magnolia’s Raspberry Cream Chees Breakfast Buns looked like this before going in the oven:

Bake the buns for 30 minutes. Test to make sure they are fully cooked with a cake tester. You can dust the top with powdered sugar once they cool,but I liked how they looked,especially the ones where I swirled the top. Here is what the tray looked like right out of the oven:

Since I arranged these on trays for my friend’s Thanksgiving meal,I got tons of feedback. The consensus was that the appearance was best of the swirled top muffins,but the taste was the best of the ones where I put the preserves into the hole in the center of the muffin. In the future,I will both put some preserves into the center of the muffin AND swirl some more into the top. I also want to experiment in the future with increasing the amount of cream cheese. This recipe is definitely a keeper though,even as is! Here is one more photo for you of one of the Raspberry Cream Cheese Breakfast Buns (with the preserves in the center) cut in half:

The final Thanksgiving pastry trays will be my next post…I promise!!!