Easy Honey Pear Muffins with Cinnamon Streusel

These Easy Honey Pear Muffins are the perfect breakfast or snack for Fall! Pears are overflowing at the grocery store this time of year, and these moist, fluffy muffins incorporate about 3 of them with cinnamon and a sweet and crunchy streusel on top for the perfect Fall bake.

Why You'll Love This Recipe

• This pear breakfast recipe is great to make ahead so you can wake up to delicious muffins!
• These muffins are made without any granulated sugar! There's brown sugar in the crumb topping, but the muffins themselves are sweetened purely with local honey!
• It's as scrumptious as my popular cinnamon coffee cake muffins recipe, but with the addition of my favorite fall fruit!
• These easy pear muffins come together in about 30 minutes and will make your whole house smell like warm Fall flavors.
• The brown sugar cinnamon streusel makes it extra tasty and texturized.

Ingredients

• Ripe pears are washed, peeled, and mashed to add both flavor and moisture to these muffins. The best pears for baking will be really fragrant and soft when you press gently on the side.
• Local Hive™ Nor Cal Raw & Unfiltered Honey is used to sweeten the muffin batter. It's bottled from local Californian bees, giving it a unique flavor that pairs deliciously with pears.
• This recipe for pear muffins uses both baking soda and baking powder. This ensures great rise of your muffins, keeping them light and fluffy.
• Buttermilk is a key ingredient to activate the the baking soda and add a slight tang to balance out the sweetness.

See recipe card below for a full list of ingredients and measurements.

Substitutions & Variations

• If you can't find pears, you can swap out 1.5 cups of unsweetened chunky applesauce.
• Add some crunch by mixing in ½ cup chopped, toasted walnuts to the batter in Step 4.
• Try incorporating old fashioned oats to the streusel in Step 1 for some additional texture and flavor.
• Ginger pear is a classic flavor combination. Turn these into ginger pear muffins by adding ¼ teaspoon of ground ginger to the batter with the cinnamon.

This recipe has not been tested with other substitutions or variations. If you replace or add any ingredients, please let us know how it turned out in the comments below!

How To Make Honey Pear Muffins

Step 1: Make the cinnamon streusel topping. In a small bowl, mix together all purpose flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, and melted, unsalted butter until it resembles wet sand. Set aside to dry.

Step 2: Wash and peel your pears, and remove the core, stem, and seeds. In a medium bowl, mash the pears and measure out 1½ cups of pulp, leaving any excess liquid behind.

Step 3: In a large mixing bowl, whisk together honey, buttermilk, oil, vanilla extract, egg, and mashed pears.

Step 4: Stir flour, cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, and salt into the wet ingredients.

Step 5: Place 12 parchment cup liners into a regular muffin pan and fill each one to the top with the muffin batter.

Step 6: Sprinkle streusel over the top of each muffin.

Bake at 400°F for 5 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 350°F and bake for another 13-15 minutes, until a toothpick comes out of the center of the muffins clean. Transfer to a cooling rack in the muffin tin for 10 minutes, then transfer muffins to the rack to cool completely.

Expert Baking Tips

1. Oftentimes, grocery stores will put pears on sale if they are either underripe or overripe. Go ahead and buy them in either case for this pear muffin recipe. If they are overripe, it will be easy to mash them. And if they are underripe, place them in a brown paper bag on the counter next to your bananas, and they will ripen quickly!
2. Preheat oven before you start mixing your muffin batter. Preheating to 400F can take some time depending on your oven, and you want to bake the batter quickly after mixing all of the ingredients together.
3. Use a food scale to weigh your flour in grams (see metric tab in recipe card below). Flour often gets packed into measuring cups so too much is added to the batter, and this yields dry, dense muffins. Using a scale ensures accurate measurements!
4. Baking the pear muffins on the middle rack and rotating them halfway through will help your honey pear muffins bake more evenly. I also recommend keeping an oven thermometer inside to make sure it's at the correct temperature!

Recipe FAQs

Storage

Room Temperature

Let the honey pear muffins cool completely, then place them in an airtight container and store for up to 3 days.

Freezing Instructions

Wrap cooled muffins in plastic wrap and place in a freezer bag for up to 2 months. Bring to room temperature on the counter for at least an hour before serving.

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