Remember those muffins I made the other day? I'm gonna post the recipe here, its originally from the breakfast episode of America's Test Kitchen (such a good show). The muffins were so good! They were really blueberryish and not too sweet! The sugar/lemon mixture on the top added the perfect amount of sweetness! Its also given me great use of the muffin tag on the blog.
Start out with some fresh blueberries! I'm sure you could substitute frozen berries in a pinch if you needed to.
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| Fresh Blueberries! |
Lemon Sugar Topping
1/3 cup sugar
Zest from one lemon (about 1 ½ teaspoons)
Muffins
2 cups fresh blueberries
1 1/8 cups sugar, plus one teaspoon
2 ½ cups AP flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon table salt
2 large eggs
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
¼ cup vegetable oil
1 cup buttermilk
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract
Stir the sugar and zest together until combined; set aside.
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| Lemon and Microplane for zesting |
Adjust oven rack to upper-middle position and heat oven to 425 degrees. Spray standard muffin tin with nonstick spray. Bring 1 cup blueberries and 1 teaspoon sugar to simmer in small saucepan over medium heat. Cook, mashing berries with a spoon several times and stirring frequently, until berries have broken down and mixture is thickened and reduced to ¼ cup, about 6-8 minutes. Transfer to bowl and cool to room temperature, 10-15 minutes.
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| Cooking down the blueberries and sugar. |
Whisk flour, baking powder, and salt together in large bowl. Whisk remaining 1 1/8 cups sugar and eggs together in medium bowl until thick and homogeneous. Whisk in buttermilk and vanilla until combined. Using rubber spatula, fold egg mixture and remaining cup blueberries into flour mixture until just moistened. The batter will be very lumpy with spots of dry flour; do not overmix!
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| Jeffrey mixing the batter |
Use an ice cream scoop or large spoon to divide batter equally among muffin cups (batter should completely fill cups and mound slightly). Spoon teaspoon of cooked berry mixture into center of each mound, pushing it below the surface. Using chopstick or skewer, gently swirl berry filling into batter using figure eight motion. Sprinkle lemon sugar evenly over muffins.
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Adding the berry mixture to the batter
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Bake until muffin tops are golden and just firm, about 17-19 minutes, rotating muffin tin (front to back) halfway through cooking time. Cool muffins in tin for about 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack and cool 5 more minutes.
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| The finished product! |
I only have two things to add. First, about halfway through making the muffins, we realized that we didn't realize we didn't have vegetable oil. So we used applesauce from Trader Joe's as a substitute, it worked out really well. The only other thing is that instead of mixing in the blueberry sauce after you've poured all of the batter into the muffin tin, next time I'm going to put the sauce in after half of the batter is in each tin. That way the bottoms of the muffin are just as blueberryish as the tops!
