"blueberry muffins" news and stories

My love of pancakes notwithstanding, muffins are one of my favorite breakfast foods. They're available at just about any coffee shop or bakery and are equally good on-the-go or when nibbled at while savoring a cup of coffee. If you're inclined to make them, it only takes minutes to asseble the batter and bake them up. If you're still worried about time, they can almost always be made a day in advance, too. This particular muffin uses dried blueberries instead of fresh or frozen, so there is no blue/pink discoloration of the muffin, but you still get that blueberry flavor. To get a high, domed rise on your muffins, check out our tips on how to make a bakery-style muffin.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]

While I enjoy many, many varieties of homemade muffins, from light and moist to heavy and healthy, I have always found the bakery-like muffin difficult to recreate at home. Who doesn't love the fluffy interior, crispy ledge and high, domed top of muffins from a coffee shop or bakery? With the help of The Best Recipe, I compiled a few tips to picking a recipe and recreating these at home:

• Choose a muffin recipe that uses yogurt or buttermilk as a liquid, which will make a thicker batter and support the muffin in a high rise.
• A thick batter will allow you to heap the batter into muffin tins without it spreading all over the pan. This will ensure a high rise and create a small shelf around the base of the muffin.
• Even when using an acidic ingredient like yogurt or buttermilk, a muffin leavened mostly with baking powder will achieve a higher rise than one with baking soda alone.
• Using butter instead of oil and creaming it with the sugar will create a fluffier texture, not to mention that butter will give the muffins a more delicate (and delicious) flavor than oil.

Here is a fuller account of making bakery-style muffins, as well as a recipe for the Cinnamon Chocolate Chip Muffins pictured above. Or, you can check out Elise's Blueberry Muffin variation of the same recipe.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]