I was definitely of two minds for deciding whether to post this recipe at all and to blog about it (English Muffin Pizza (REC0007)). On the one hand, sure, it’s a light recipe, I like having it in the collection, it’s kind of fun, etc. On the other hand, it isn’t a “new” recipe, we’ve made it several times, and as far as recipes go, it’s not much more detailed than how to make a sandwich.

But the more I thought about it, and ignoring my OCD urge to put all the recipes I ever think are good on the site and to blog about making them, I realized I could adapt / expand the recipe to show other variations. So I created three “parts” to the assembly process.

First and foremost, there is your base — what type of English muffin are you going to choose? I can’t imagine ever going with cinnamon raisin, but hey, whatever floats your boat on your sea of taste buds.

Second, there is the foundation layer — the cheese and sauce. I like to put the cheese on last, but most pizza places put it on top of the sauce. And there are variations for doing tomato paste, pizza sauce, simple tomato sauce, or even salsa — again, it depends on your own personal palate.

Finally, there are the toppings. The original recipe came from a ground beef cookbook, but it isn’t really limited to that of course. We often do Hawaiian, but I added an option for heavy on the meat (close to original), a veggie option (although if you went with a lot of toppings, might be too much) and something approximating the Super Supreme at Pizza Hut (this one has a LOT of toppings).

Separate from the fact that it is a different texture than real pizza, it is also fun and highly personalized. Jacob can choose whichever toppings he wants:

And help assemble all of them:

We did this for his sixth birthday party with a bunch of kids, and it worked well:

Part of the reason it works so well is the sizes and portions are totally scalable (just make an extra one or two if they want more) and totally controllable for size of mess / space needed to prepare compared with doing full pizzas. And they all liked the personalization factor.

They go in easy:

They come out easy:

I’d show you a pic on my plate too, but apparently they get eaten pretty easily too. You can assemble and then freeze too for up to 3 months if you want to create a larger batch at a time, but the cook-from-frozen basically doubles the cooking time to the same as a regular frozen pizza.