Mashed Potato Mini Muffins #Pinspiration

In case you’re new here, or you haven’t seen me do this before, today’s Tuesday and on Tuesday’s I post a Pinspiration.  A Pinspiration is a post about a pin I’ve seen on Pinterest, thought was cool, and decided to try out.  It can be food, beauty, clothes, hair or really anything.  I try it out, maybe make a change (or not) and post about it.  I do this challenge with 3 other bloggers and if you want to join us, we’d love to have you!  There’s a linky below.  We’ve been doing it almost two months now and I think it’s a lot of fun.  It makes me get off my butt and actually do something of the cool things I pin on Pinterest rather than doing a whole pin for “later” that never happens.

Today’s pinspiration came from this pin, which doesn’t even link to a website but is a cool pict of mashed potatoes in a muffin tin.  Mashed potatoes AND muffins?  Seemed like an awesome combo to make so I played around with it and this is what I came up with.  SO good, people.

Mashed Potato Mini Muffins

I used red potatoes as I often do.  I’ve been making a variation of Rachael Ray’s Smashed Potatoes for years now, which calls for using red potatoes and includes the skin.  I want to say it’s because I like the taste of the skin (I do), but the driving force in using red potatoes for me is the fact that I don’t have to peel them.  Score!  It saves so much time when you don’t have to do that and there’s all sorts of vitamins and goodies that are good for you in the skin of a potato so I’m all about using red potatoes & their skin for all of these reasons.  Also, I thought that keeping the skin in the mashing process might make them a bit more moldable to the muffin tin shape, and I was right.

You need:
Bag of small red potatoes
Butter

That’s it!  I boiled and mashed up my potatoes as I normally would.  I sprayed my mini muffin tin, seasoned the potatoes with some fresh ground pepper and then scooped them into the mini muffin spots.

I then melted a half stick of butter in a microwaveable bowl.  Using a fork, I made cross grain marks on the top of each muffin, dipping the fork into the melted butter each time to give it a buttery/crispy finish hopefully when it was done cooking.

They cooked for about 25-30 minutes at 350.  I really had no idea of time but after about 20 minutes, I felt they needed an extra last bit of time to get crispy on the top.

We ate the ENTIRE muffin tin at dinner.  My kids would never do that normally so I’m making these again! Great comfort food for sure.