"chocolate chip muffins" news and stories

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]