Last year, you may have noticed that I was trying out a lot of bread, which was intentional. This year, we have a few themes at work. First, my sister Nicole has nudged me towards a vegetarian diet, which I'm loosely following. I have no reservations about eating meat but probably won't have a lot of that around. Second, California has wonderful agriculture all-around, conveniently available at farmers' markets, so we'll try to buy more from there and eat seasonally. And finally, Julie mentioned that she was interested in learning how to cook Chinese food. I think my appearance may deceive her into thinking that this will work out, but I'll just throw in random Chinese words that sound like they could be food and use plenty of soy sauce to fake my way through teaching.
But that's not where we're starting. This past weekend, I wanted to break in some of the equipment my sister carried through checked baggage from Texas. With so many berries around, I thought that muffins might be a good choice. After finding nothing in my fairly large collection of delicious bookmarks from food blogs, I went into the very scary Word documents my family has compiled, and we picked out a recipe for blueberry streusel muffins.
I'm certain I have witnessed my mom make muffins before, and I have baked many different things, too, but when we started these muffins, I had the distinct sense that I had never done this before. Particularly, the recipe called for the butter to be cut into the dry mixture but presumably not mixed all the way in. So how much was I supposed to mix it? I took a cue from my bread-baking last summer and went for pea-sized, which seemed to work out.
Until this point, I had been mixing by hand, and when I discussed this with Julie and Holly later over dinner, they both commented that they had rarely ever mixed by hand. Count me as shocked. I only used an electric mixer when it was called for specifically, which happened perhaps twice all of last summer. My family had always made our cookie dough mixing by hand, and although it seemed like a little work, my mom swore by the strength gained through mixing. Right now, I can still imagine her looking over her glasses, speaking emphatically and wagging her finger. Maybe because she does that for a lot of things.
Anyways, like brownies or pancakes, the recipe called for it to be barely mixed, at the risk of lumps. And since the blueberries needed to be treated gently, that was a good break from the more difficult mixing, though Julie actually did most of the manual labor there. I'm really chivalrous like that.
After that, it was little work to scoop it into the greased pan. When I talked about it with my mom later, she had the good tip of not just greasing, but also dusting with flour to help the muffins out easier since we were baking them directly into the pan.
Baking went just fine, and it appears that our oven is in working order. 30 minutes later, we pulled these out, with the crumbly streusel very nicely decorating the top. You can even see the monster we had in the background that was made with the leftover batter. It was like a giant muffin top i.e. delicious.
Unfortunately, the muffins didn't quite come out of the tin as planned. They didn't stick; that was good news. The problem was that the inside was so soft and moist that I ended up tearing through quite a few of them trying to pull them out. Julie was not worried as it meant more snacks for her, and enough came out presentable enough that we gobbled up the ones that really fell apart. See Mr. Leaning Muffin shying away from the camera in the back left of the picture below.
Otherwise, the muffins came out great. The blueberries stayed intact, the streusel was yummy, and the muffin top and the inside had just the right consistency.
I would absolutely take the recipe without modification. What did need some change was my muffin-removing technique. Overall, we managed to mostly do the right thing in terms of mixing without knowing so. If you're going to take a shot at muffins, I recommend reading this guide, which explains how to deal with all of the ambiguities in the mixing process. From the description, it sounds like this recipe we used was a textbook example of a muffin recipe.
Except for the explaining part in the directions. That would've been helpful.
Blueberry Streusel Muffins
2 ½ cup (625ml) AP flour
1 ¼ cup (300ml) sugar
½ tsp. (2ml) cinnamon
1 Tbsp (15ml) baking powder
1 cup (250ml) butter 2 eggs
1 ½ tsp (7ml) vanilla
¾ cup (175ml) milk
2 cups (500ml) blueberries
Combine dry ingredients. Cut into butter(sic) until it is in tiny pieces. Remove ½ cup (125ml) for topping. Combine milk with eggs & vanilla. Add to dry ingredients, stirring until just moistened. Fold in blueberries. Spoon into greased muffin tins, sprinkle with topping mixture. Bake 30-35 minutes at 350F (180C).
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