Kristen bought me an air fryer accessory set for Christmas, so I decided to try the silicone mini-muffin pan this morning and make blueberry muffins. The results were… less than perfect. The problem with my air fryer is that it has no window, so in order to see if something’s done I have to pull them out of the fryer and interrupt the cooking process. In this case, I had looked at internet recipes for the timing and temp, but stuck to the traditional blueberry muffin recipe that we’ve always used at home. This is because foods usually cook a lot faster, and at lower temps in the air fryer as opposed to a regular oven. What I didn’t realize is that the actual recipes for air fryer muffins are completely different, so my traditional recipe was not the best choice.
You can probably tell from the hodge-podge above that the results were far from perfect. The most obvious thing is that they hadn’t risen. Recipes on the internet had said to bake the muffins at 340 degrees for about 15 minutes. When I looked at mine, the tops were nicely browned, so I gave them the toothpick test, for some reason the toothpick came out clean. As I tried to get them out of the silicone tray, two of them broke, and I could see raw batter inside. I put the pieces back together and put the entire batch back into the air fryer. It took another 15 minutes worth of cooking in order to get them fully baked, and of course they never rose properly.
For the second batch, I decided to go with the regular oven so that I could monitor how they were doing. I continued to use the silicone mini muffin pan, but followed the regular oven directions of 375 degrees, for 25 minutes. The muffins rose properly, although the curved bottom of the mini muffin pan makes them look a little different. Below I have a comparison of the two batches and their size difference.
