Muffin Recipe

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Adding the berry mixture to the batter

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.

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!

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Mojo Monday - Get Crafty--ReUse It!

Gooooood Morning everyone!


Hope everyone had a great weekend. I'm pretty bummed about the Jets loss :/. Piggy is even more upset than I am; but she says there is always next year; and another year for Mark Sanchez to mature will only help everyone. 


But Monday morning always brings us a new Mojo Monday, and today is no different!!


Today's Mojo Monday is a Get Crafty challenge from Kim called ReUse It

Ok, we are all guilty of it! We hold on to things because we know we can reuse it. Here is the time to do it. Your first Get Crafty challenge is to reuse an item not intended for scrapbooking to make something pretty! For this challenge you need to reuse something that would normally be thrown away and make a layout, card, or altered project out of it. 

[Head over to the thread to] take a look at what the CT made out of our "junk"!

Here is my project. See anything you recognize? its the project I was working on Friday night and posted sneaks of!! I absolutely love how it came out.

And the junk that I used? This cut out sheet of chipboard! It came with one of the board games I got for Christmas. After I punched out all of the little game pieces, I looked at it and said---hey! That would make a great mask! So I used that to mask the background with a bunch of mist colors to create that circle pattern.

I worked a whole bunch on my Project Life: Memorabilia Album over the weekend, so I'll have a bunch of stuff to share with you tomorrow! I'm really liking how this is turning out as well.  Its been a great learning experience. Between using more "memorabilia" type stuff in my work, and trying out some more mixed media techniques, I've really learned a lot in the past couple weeks. 

Over on the Project Life blog, Jessica Bree just put up a new post about using memorabilia to create your pages themselves. This is a lot of what I've been doing, and she showcases it fantastically--so head on over to the blog and check out her new pages, they are fantastic!

Also! I hope to have lots of great muffin pictures up tomorrow! The muffins were seriously fantastic, and I highly recommend the recipe to everyone! The ONLY thing I would change at all, is mixing in a little bit of the jam before putting all the batter into each of the muffin tins. I can't wait to make them again!

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BooYay! Saturday--late night edition.

Yay - OB Tampons are gonna be back on shelves soon --now you wont have to buy OB Ultra Fluid Lock tampons - Lot of 5 boxes: qty 200 - eBay 
Boo -  Maybe the most terrifying product ever. The Snazzy Napper
Yay - Football tomorrow! The last day of real football before the Super Bowl. Let's Go Jets!
Boo - Weather Forecast says at least another FOOT of snow on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. OMG.
Yay - Two concerts this week! Brad Mehldau @ Carnegie Hall on Wedesday, and Sharon Jones and the Dapp Kings next Saturday.
Boo? Yay? Idk? - My last week before my 25th birthday. I think I'm feeling boo right now.

And I'll leave you with a picture of the AMAZING muffins I made. Here's a link to the recipe. They were so so good! The secret is making a blueberry jam with a cup of blueberrys and some sugar, and then swirling that into the muffin batter. Every bite has awesome blueberry flavor!

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Sneaky Saturday!

I worked on a project last night until like 3am. It turned out to be one of my favorite projects of all time!! I'll show off the finished product on Monday when we reveal the Mojo Monday Topic!

But for now here are a couple sneaks!

If I don't get on again before tomorrow, Let's Go Jets!! Piggy will be back with updates on the scoring of tomorrow's game. So make sure to check my twitter and tumblr feeds! Off to make muffins!

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