Maple Bacon Mini Muffins With Maple Glaze

5 from 4 votes

A great choice for a breakfast buffet or pot-luck. Make the night before, and drizzle the glaze on before serving.

Prep Time40

Cook Time12

Total Time1

Course: Breakfast, Dessert, Snack

Cuisine: American

Keyword: breakfast, buffet, crowd, foodie, muffin

Servings: mini muffins

Calories: 231kcal

Author: BlakOpal

Gather all your ingredients. You'll need the butter for the glaze to be very soft, so put it someplace warm (but don't melt it).
Preheat your oven to 350° F, and make sure your shelves are in the middle-top of the oven.
In a large frying pan, cook bacon till crisp. Remove to plate with paper towels to drain excess oil. Let cool and then cut into small crumbles. You want a few medium-sized bits, and lots of fairly small crumbs.
Divide your bacon crumbles, setting aside a quarter of them for the topping. 3/4 of the bacon will be used in the cake.

In the bowl of your mixer, add eggs and brown sugar and whisk to blend.
Add vanilla, sour cream, maple syrup, and bacon grease and mix well.
In a 2-cup pyrex measuring cup or small bowl, add the juice of one lemon (approx. 1/8 cup) to 1 cups of milk.
In a second mixing bowl, add flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Use a whisk to combine.
Add dry ingredients into the mixing bowl with wet ingredients. Add about a quarter of the dry mix and combine well, add the rest and continue to mix until well combined, scraping down sides of the bowl, and occasionally lifting the beaters.
Add in the bacon you portioned for the cake. (Remember to save some for your topping.) Stir in to combine well.
Remove bowl from mixer and scrap sides and bottom with silicone scraper, turning over to make sure bacon is well-distributed throughout. Set aside.

In a small bowl, add brown sugar, sugar, and flour. Mix together well with a whisk.
Melt butter, add maple syrup and stir together.
Pour butter mixture into the sugar mixture. Using a fork, toss the mixture to coat, but don't overtax. You want large crumbs to form.
Add the reserved bacon, and stir to mix. The topping should still have big and small lumps in it. This will form your crumble topping on the muffins.

Spray two 12-mini-muffin tins with non-stick spray for baking (it has flour in it).
I recommend doing two pans at a time, it will speed up the baking, and the pans are small, so most ovens will accommodate two of them on one shelf.
Using a 1 Tablespoon measuring spoon, scoop cake batter into each cup. They will be about 3/4 full. Don't over-fill, they will grow!
Sprinkle some of the crumb topping onto each mini-muffin. Don't overflow the cup, and wipe any crumbs off the tray into one of the muffins.
Put the two trays of muffin batter and crumble on to the middle-top shelf of the oven. You don't want it near the bottom, or the bottom of the muffins will get overcooked. If your oven won't accommodate both pans on one rack, you should swap shelves halfway through the bake.
Bake the mini-muffins for 12 minutes at 350°.
You can test for done-ness by poking the top of one muffin. It should bounce right back. If it doesn't, return to the oven for another 1 minute.
Remove muffin pans from oven and set on rack for 2 minutes. Letting them rest will firm them up a little, making them easier to handle.
I would usually turn the muffin pans over onto the cooling racks, but I found that the crumbs tend to fall off when I do that, so instead, I take a fork and gently lift them out of the pans one at a time, and set them on the cooling rack.

While the muffins are baking, you can quickly whip up the glaze.
In a 2-cup pyrex measuring cup with spout, combine powdered sugar, cinnamon, very soft butter, vanilla bean paste, and maple syrup. Stir to combine well.
Pour the glaze into a bottle for drizzling. (If you don't have a bottle, you can pour the glaze into a ziplock bag. When you are ready to drizzle, snip a small bit off the corner of the bag.) Set aside.

Once the muffins are cool you are ready to finish them.
If you are making these to eat at home (yay!), assemble the muffins on a tray and skip ahead to the drizzle section.
If you will be taking these muffins to another location, you can transfer the cooled muffins to an airtight container. Use parchment paper between the layers to keep them from sticking to each other.
Assemble your mini-muffins on your serving tray. If you will be doing several layers of muffins in a stack, drizzle each layer before adding the next one.
Step back and admire your muffins! (Don't forget to do this step!)