Recipe #104: Pine Nut Muffins

Pine Nut Muffins

Pine nuts were another type of food I'd never tried, but they tasted okay (maybe a little bit bitter), so I thought they'd make some nice muffins. I chose a recipe called Honey Date Pine Nut Muffins from the website, Food Lust People Love. The recipe was adapted from a plain honey muffin recipe that the author, Stacy Rushton, found on the Taste of Home website.

Stacy lives in Dubai, and so was interested in creating muffins for her Muslim friends to eat during Ramadan. Dates are an important food during that time, as is yogurt. Pine nuts go nicely with honey and dates, I think. These muffins came out sweet and hearty (perhaps because I used white whole wheat flour instead of all purpose flour). I also used oil instead of butter, but otherwise followed the recipe. Unfortunately, as with Stacy's recipe, my muffins didn't rise very high either. That was okay, though, because they tasted good.

I found that most of the pine nut recipes I encountered call for the nuts to be ground up before putting them together with the flour. They seemed to be meant to take the place of flour. And because pine nut "flour" has no gluten, I'm guessing that's the reason the muffins didn't rise very much. I guess that was fine, though the flavor of the muffins reminded me, in a way, of German muffins that have ground nuts, although in that case they're almonds. Interesting.

My tasters liked them, as did I, and so they were a success. I probably wouldn't make them again, however, as the pine nuts were a little hard to obtain.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5, because they didn't rise very high.

Next: Pistachio Muffins