Cinnamon Sugar Breakfast Puffs

The ingredients: flour, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, nutmeg, cloves, orange zest, sugar, baking powder, butter, milk and egg.  

Baking powder makes the puffs "puff."  

The puffs themselves have four different spices, but not too much of any of them.  

Zesting an orange for the batter.  

Amanda, deep in concentration, butters the muffin tin.  

The batter starts with brown butter, which you should cool a little before adding the other ingredients.  

Creaming the melted butter with sugar and eggs.  

Why so cheerful? We rarely get to use the hand blender (it often gets overlooked, tucked into a low cupboard).  

Adding the dry ingredients, in stages.  

And alternating with splashes of milk.  

You don't want too much batter in each muffin cup -- a few tablespoons at most.  

Golden and pillowy, the puffs emerge from the oven, and we flip them out while they're still warm using a sharp knife.  

We found that piercing the bottoms with a sharp fork worked well for dipping the hot puffs in the melted butter.  

Teamwork.  

Breakfast is served!