Photo: Alex Martinez

Creative cooks have found many unorthodox uses for muffin tins. You can use them to help create a steamy environment in your oven (crucial to crusty bread). You can use them to make individual frittata/quiche/strata-like eggy wonders for brunch. Or you can use them to make Myron Mixon's World-Famous Cupcake Chicken.

Mixon, whose family started a barbecue take-out business in Georgia, is a competitive pit master who proudly wears a massive ring commemorating his third barbecue world championship win. He competes in many events, from Whole Hog to Pork Shoulder, and knows just what the judges are looking for. When it comes to chicken, they want thighs—and they want them all the same size. Chicken thighs can vary, of course, though most are square-shaped. So Mixon found that by using poultry shears to trim them to three or four inches wide, he could fit a square piece of meat into a round hole—the muffin tin—and they'd all be the same dimension.

[After the jump, what exactly cupcake chicken looks like...]

Photo: Alex Martinez

Mixon's cupcake method also solved another common chicken problem. Or, as he puts it, "You know how sometimes you eat barbecued chicken and the skin's like rubber?" Poking a hole in the bottom of each muffin cup and then setting the tin in a baking pan filled with chicken broth creates a steamy environment that helps soften the skin. Mixon says the trick results in chicken thighs that are so easy to chew, "you barely even notice the skin!" They're also moist, deeply flavored and slightly sweet (which, come to think of it, are qualities we don't mind in a cupcake either).

Mixon's technique can be done on a grill, in a smoker or even in an oven. For more of Mixon's recipes, see his new book, Smokin' with Myron Mixon: Recipes Made Simple, from the Winningest Man in Barbecue.

Recipes
Myron Mixon's World-Famous Cupcake Chicken
Basic Chicken Rub, Basic Vinegar Sauce and Basic Hickory Sauce