♥ Blueberry Muffins (and our Love-Hate Relationship) ♥

    I feel a cheer coming on.

    You know...probably just from myself, but hey, it's still a cheer.

    Why the cheering?

    Well, the picture above is... (drum-roll,) my first picture on the blog! Yayyyyy!

     ....Anyway,back to the muffins.
For some strange reason that I just can't understand, I seem to have some sort of...blueberry muffin curse. Maybe it's just with blueberries in general; I still don't know, but what I do know is that whenever I attempt to make something with blueberries, it just falls flat.

    In the past year, I've attempted 5 different muffin recipes, and none seem to work: either they're too dry, too bland, too tough, or just not sweet enough. This was extremely frustrating, especially since I had been using "award winning recipes" from all over; even one from my favorite recipe site, Allrecipes, seemed to fall flat, even after it got hundreds of rave reviews. Maybe it was just me, but if I've made a recipe 3+ times, I'm going to go ahead and assume it's not my fault. (Maybe.)

    Maybe trying to get a pastry to taste just like one from a snack machine is a little unrealistic, being that they're full of preservatives to keep them moist and artificial flavors for taste, but I can't help it. The muffins I recently made though, are the closest to a store-bought muffins I've come close to. Strangely enough, the recipe came from my mother's Neiman Marcus Taste cookbook, something I wouldn't even think of touching a few years back. The recipes, accompanied by beautiful pictures, we're very intimidating then, but now, seem a lot more simple than I thought.

    This recipe was simple enough: it doesn't even require a mixer, though I feel like it would make things a lot easier. It includes a lovely cinnamon crumble topping, which was actually my favorite part of the muffin. Now, maybe it was just me but personally, I didn't think they came out all that great. My family liked them, especially my father, who has a mini-obsession with anything blueberry and is a bit critical about his pastries, said they we're "really really good" (which either means they really were, or just said that to get me to hush up). They weren't dry, but they weren't unbelievably moist either. Like I said before, I especially liked the crumble topping. (cinnamon, brown sugar, and butter...you can't go wrong with that!)

    So, before I continue to ramble on....welcome to my first kitchen adventure!

Blueberry Muffins (Titled Anita's Blueberry-Sour Cream Morning Muffins in the Book)

Ingredients:
(for muffins)
♥ 2 ½ cups Cake flour
♥ 2 teaspoons baking powder
♥ 1 teaspoon baking soda
♥ 1/4 teaspoon salt
♥ 2 large eggs plus 1 large egg yolk
♥ 1 ½ sticks unsalted butter, melted
♥ 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
♥ 1 cup sour cream
♥ ½ cup buttermilk, well shaken
♥ 1½ cups plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
♥ ½ pint of fresh blueberries, or 1 cup frozen

(for crumble topping)
♥ 1½ cups all-purpose flour
♥ ½ cup light brown sugar
♥ 2 teaspoons granulated sugar
♥ 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
♥ ¼ teaspoon salt
♥12 tablespoons (1½ sticks) unsalted butter, cut into small pieces, room temperature

1.) Preheat oven to 35O°F. Place cupcake papers in lightly-sprayed cupcake pans (I ended up with about 18 muffins, but I overfilled a few, so I'd go with about 2O-22 muffins total.)

2.)To prepare muffins, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt into a bowl and set aside. (to sift together dry ingredients, you can just use a whisk and whisk them all together.)

3.) In another bowl, whisk together eggs and yolk, vanilla, melted butter, sour cream, and buttermilk. (As you stir in the sour cream, the mixture may look as if it's starting to curdle, but it's perfectly fine.)

4.) After liquid ingredients have been mixed, add sugar and mix completely. Gradually add flour mixture to liquid ingredients, and stir until combined. It is fine if the mixture still has lumps.



5.) Rinse blueberries to rid them of any dirt, and pat them dry. Fold them into the batter.

7.) To make crumble topping, place butter in a medium sized bowl. In a separate bowl, stir together the flour, brown sugar, granulated sugar, cinnamon, and salt. Gradually add the dry ingredients to butter, and using your fingers or a fork (fingers work better), break up the butter and incorporate the mixture until it becomes coarse and crumbly.

6.) Divide the batter equally among the muffin cups. Sprinkle crumble topping over each muffin. (I had left over topping, but this is probably because I didn't have as many muffins as I was supposed to. Only fill each cup no more than 2/3 of the way, if using a normal cupcake/muffin tin.)

7.) Bake for 10-15 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. . (My first tray dried out, and I left them in there for 13 minutes. Oven power varies for each oven, so begin checking muffins at 10 minutes.) Remove pan from oven and leave muffins on a cooling rack to rest

     And wa-la! Cute-sie little muffins...well, the ones that didn't come out like giant, over-filled blobs.
This is the best recipe for muffins I've found so far, so if anyone has a better recipe, or is feeling daring enough to tinker with this one, be my guest! It'd be lovely to get over my "Muffin Curse", but until then...Happy Muffin Making! ♥