Oatmeal Flax Blueberry Muffins

My mom has a new diet after her bout with diverticulitis.  She is supposed to eat lots of flax to avoid having another episode. She has been good about sprinkling some over her cereal in the morning, but when she requested blueberry muffins, I went looking for a recipe that has flax in it.  Voila: Pinch of Yum to the rescue.

These guys are pretty interesting because the first step is to soak oatmeal in buttermilk for 15-20 minutes.  That softens them and makes them nearly invisible in the muffins later on.  You can taste that they're there, but they kind of dissolve. Then of course there are fun things like brown sugar, vanilla, and blueberries, and don't forget a heaping tablespoon of ground flax.

These muffins called for a crumb topping and glaze, but knowing that my mom hates both, I left them off.  They were entirely wonderful without them, but I will keep the recipe intact in case you want to give them a try.  They are sweet enough without it, though.  Plus you can do the whole thing in 1 bowl!

One thing I really wish I had noticed before I started: this makes 6 muffins.  So double it if you're looking to make 12, which obviously I was, but oh well!

Recipe:

oatmeal flax blueberry muffins
from Pinch of Yum
makes 6 muffins

Ingredients:
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 1/2 tablespoons salted butter, melted
1 egg
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup + 1 tablespoon flour
1 heaping tablespoon ground flaxmeal
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup blueberries
for topping and glaze:
1 tablespoon cold butter, cut into small pieces
3 tablespoons flour
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1/2 tablespoon milk

Instructions:

1) Preheat the oven to 375 degrees  If you're not using paper liners, grease a muffin tin with butter and dust with flour.

2) Combine oats and buttermilk in a large mixing bowl.  Let oats soak 15-20 minutes.  Add the melted butter, egg, brown sugar, and vanilla.  Stir by hand until just combined.

3) Add flour, flaxmeal, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.  Stir again until just moistened.

4) Scoop a spoonful of batter into each muffin tin to prevent berries from sinking to the bottom of the muffins while baking.  Gently fold blueberries into remaining batter and divide evenly between muffin tins.  Place a few blueberries at the very top center of each muffin.

5)  For the crumb topping, press butter, flour and brown sugar together withy our fingers until fine crumbs form.  Sprinkle one spoonful of crumbs over each muffin before baking.

6) Bake muffins for 13 - 15 minutes, or until golden brown.  While the muffins are cooling, stir the powdered sugar and milk together to make a glaze.  Drizzle a little glaze over each muffin before serving.

Blueberry Muffins

The quest continues.  You've heard about it before, and you'll hear about it again.  These muffins were good, but they weren't The Ones either.

They were soft, fluffy and full of blueberries, just sweet enough to count as muffins but delicious enough to feel like a dessert.  I made them at my mom's one day to thank my family for being insanely amazing and wonderful.  I think muffins are a good trade for support, love and daily doggy daycare!

One word of warning: they turned into rocks by the next morning.  These are best eaten the day you bake them.  Otherwise they may or may not be given to mice as treats.  True story.

Recipe:

blueberry muffins
from Sally's Baking Addiction
makes 15-16 standard muffins or 30 mini muffins

Ingredients:
3 cups all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 eggs, room temperature preferred
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup buttermilk or milk
1/2 canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 fresh or frozen blueberries
coarse sugar for sprinkling (optional)

Instructions:

1) Preheat oven to 425 degrees.  Spray your muffin tin of choice with non-stick spray or line with muffin liners.  Set aside.

2) In a large bowl, gently toss together flour, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon.  Mix until all dry ingredients are combined -  a 20 second toss to disperse everything together.  Set aside.

3) In a medium bowl, whisk together eggs and sugar until combined.  mix in milk, oil, and vanilla.  Mixture will be pale and yellow.  Fold wet ingredients into dry ingredients and mix everything together by hand.  Avoid over mixing.  Gently mix until all the flour is off the bottom of the bowl and no big pockets of flour remain.  The batter will be very thick and somewhat lumpy.  Fold in the blueberries.

4) Pour batter into prepared muffin tins, filling all the way to the top.  Top with a sprinkle of course sugar if preferred.  Bake for 5 minutes at 425 degrees, then reduce oven temperature to 375 and continue to bake for 13 - 14 minutes until tops are lightly golden and centers appear set.  For mini muffins, bake at 375 the whole time for 11 - 12 minutes.  Allow to cool for 10 minutes in pan.

Blueberry Muffins

I continue the quest to find the world's most perfect blueberry muffin.  I have thoroughly enjoyed many of the muffins I've made in the past, but my mom is in constant search for the exact muffins she used to get at DiBurro's in Seabrook every summer.  She says they are "perfect: gummy and not too sweet."  That doesn't sound great to me, but hey, I will do what I can to help her find the muffin of her dreams!

Also, how cute is this muffin tin!? Thanks Paul and Kecee!

This muffin wasn't that muffin.  But - she did say this is the closest I've ever gotten.  I figured the yogurt would help with what Mom calls "the gumminess" - I think she means that they're moist.  There are lots of berries - 2 whole cups - and a dash of nutmeg.  Try these out, and let me know: are these the perfect blueberry muffin?

Recipe:

blueberry muffins
from The Pioneer Woman


Ingredients:
3 cups minus 2 tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
heavy pinch of salt
dash of nutmeg
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 egg
1 generous cup plain unflavored yogurt
2 cups fresh blueberries
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
turbinado sugar

Instructions:

1) Preheat oven to 385 degrees.  Butter a muffin tin.

2) In a large bowl, sift flour, baking soda, nutmeg, baking powder, and salt.  Set aside.

3) In another large bowl, whisk together sugar, oil, vanilla, egg, and yogurt.  Add the dry ingredients and stir to a count of 10.

4) Add blueberries, reserving 1/2 cup, to mixture and stir 3 times.

5) Add mixture to muffin pans. Sprinkle remaining berries on top and press down lightly.  Sprinkle turbinado sugar over the top (brown sugar can be used instead).

6) Bake 20 - 25 minutes and allow to cool completely.

Blueberry Muffins

Yes, blueberry muffins.  Yes, again. Over the last year and a half, I've made more blueberry muffins than a bakery, and each time I try out a different recipe.  Now, plenty of the recipes I've tried have been absolutely delicious if you ask me, but I'll tell you something: my mom is a blueberry muffin fiend.  Not only does she love every one, but she is on the constant search for the perfect recipe.  She compares every muffin to the ones she used to get at DiBurro's in Seabrook, NH (unfortunately DiBurro's is no longer so I can't go beg them for their recipe).  They used to make, as she says, "moist, gummy, not-buttery-tasting, not overly-sweet, no sugar on top, beautiful-looking blueberry muffins."  I know - if you ask me, that doesn't sound so great either.  But she is totally obsessed with these muffins from the past; she recalls fondly how Dad used to drive up there every morning they were at the beach and pick up a bag of muffins for her.  So she constantly pins a million different blueberry muffin recipes and makes me try them out any time we have berries in the fridge - and there are a lot of recipes we have yet to try.  And thus, here we go again with blueberry muffins, take 7.

One thing that was different about the preparation of this recipe was the fact that you beat the sugar with the eggs.  I'm used to beating sugar with butter (my favorite smell), but never the eggs.  It makes a thick yellow paste, and then you add the rest of the wet ingredients to that.  I'm dorky enough that this was very interesting to me.  Other than that, they are fairly normal when it comes to the baking: folding in the dry ingredients, sprinkling the berries with flour so they don't all sink to the bottom, etcetera.

The end result was a delicious little muffin that Mom loved, but still not the elusive DiBurro's muffin of her dreams.  I think they were pretty similar to the other recipes I've made.  I will say this, though: these muffins are best eaten the day you bake them.  Luckily we ate most of them the night I baked them, but I brought one to work the next day and it was a weird mixture of stale and gummy.  Weirdly, my family still liked them but the texture was too weird for me.  Now maybe it was because it was during that weird heat wave of 90-degree temperatures in September, but nevertheless, I'd recommend scarfing them down quickly!

Recipe:

blueberry muffins
from Chris Little
makes 16 muffins

Ingredients:
2 eggs
1 cup sugar, plus more for sprinkling
3 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 cups flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 pint blueberries, rinsed and picked over
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans (optional)

Instructions:

1) Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Grease 16 cups in 2 muffin pans.  In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat the eggs and sugar until they are combined and thickened.  Add the milk and butter and beat well to just mix.  Stir in vanilla.

2) Set aside 2 tablespoons of the flour to mix with blueberries.  Then add the remaining flour, baking powder, and salt to the batter and beat well to just mix.

3) Sprinkle the blueberries with the flour and add them to the batter; if using nuts, add them here, folding them in with a rubber spatula.

4) Divide the batter among the 16 muffin cups and sprinkle the tops with sugar.  Transfer the pans to the oven and bake for 25 minutes, or until they are puffed and golden.  Leave them in the pans to cool slightly, then turn them out onto a rack to continue cooling.

From Blueberries to Zucchini

There are good parts and bad parts about coming home from vacation.  I miss the care-free days, spending the afternoon on the deck, and walking the Marginal Way.  But on the bright side: it makes me come home "feening for baking," as Mark put it.  Hence the craziness that was today.

My zucchini work station!

Mom and Kenzie went to visit my grandfather at his new nursing home in Holyoke, so they were gone all day.  I had Rachael choose what she wanted to eat from things I have pinned on Pinterest, and I was quite happy when she chose something that I was sure was another one of those things that I want to make that no one else in this house is interested in; something to add to the ranks of strawberry balsaamic pizza, goat cheese quesadillas, chick pea pot pie, mac and cheese pancakes, and mushroom pizza.  But, miracle of miracles: today Rachael wanted to eat stuffed zucchini!

About to go into the oven

This meal was very quick to put together.  You slice a zucchini in half, scoop out the insides and mix them up with feta (it called for tomato basil feta but we have an embarrassing amount of regular feta in the fridge, so I used it!), garlic powder, oregano, and tomato paste.  Then you stuff the mixture in the zucchini boats, sprinkle on some parmesan and parsely, and bake.  That's all it takes.  You're ready to go in no time.  I bought a pretty large zucchini, and Rach and I ended up just splitting one half, so there is another in the fridge for tomorrow.  We both loved our healthy little lunch though; Rach said she liked it and called it "healthfully delicious" although said she might be interested in adding pepperoni.  No thanks!  But I guess that's the beauty of the meal; you can kind of make it whatever kind of "pizza" you want.  Perhaps an addition of goat cheese would be a good idea next time? :)

Next up, I have been wanting to make a cookie that is quite different for me: chocolate crinkle cookies.  I am not really a chocolate person; I never order anything chocolatey when I am at a restaurant or bakery, and I could do without chocolate candies too, but when I found this recipe, I decided that I had to try them.  They are so pretty with their powdered sugar coats and big chocolatey wrinkles all over them.  I like when food comes out pretty without me having to do much decorating!  And these definitely come out pretty, and tasty too.  They taste a lot like brownies, but with the added powdery sugar coating.  They are delicious - and again, I'm not a chocolate lover, but I still ate three!  Rachael and Kenzie each ate 5 cookies, so I am going to assume that they love them :)  Apparently from what I have been reading, these are common Christmas cookies.  Well, it's August, and I think they are just fabulous for any time of year!

I finished up my day-o'-kitchen by making more of the blueberry muffins I made yesterday.  Shockingly by this morning, all 12 of them were gone!  As you know, we never finish the things I bake in this house.  Partly this is because we aren't big sweet eaters, partly because my mom is picky, and partly because we are pretty notorious for "forgetting" about leftover food.  No matter the reason, it's a rather sore subject for me that all my food ends up tossed.  So when I made something that all goes - and in one day - I get excited.  Hence the double batch of delicious muffins that are cooling on the counter at this second. Mom is eating one now and announcing that "these are my kind of muffins!"  Whew! Since they are a repeat recipe, I will be posting it below.  I like making these muffins; it's really fun to mix the egg, sugar, butter and sour cream together.  I'm not sure why that is fun, and I am quite sure it makes me a dork, but it's true.  So if you happen to have a cup and a half of berries, try out this recipe.

Recipes:
stuffed zucchini pizza style
chocolate crinkle cookies


blueberry muffins
from Brown-Eyed Baker, originally adapted from Baking Illustrated


yield: 12 muffins

Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 egg
1 cup granulated sugar
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
1¼ cups sour cream
1½ cups frozen or fresh blueberries

Directions:
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a standard 12-cup muffin tin (or line with paper liners) and set aside.

2. Whisk the flour, baking powder and salt in a medium bowl untill combined. Whisk the egg in a separate medium bowl until well-combined and light-colored, about 20 seconds. Add the sugar and whisk vigorously until thick, about 30 seconds. Add the melted butter in 2 or 3 additions, whisking to combine after each addition. Add the sour cream in 2 additions, whisking just to combine.

3. Add the berries to the dry ingredients and gently toss just to combine. Add the sour cream mixture and fold with a rubber spatula until the batter comes together and the berries are evenly distributed, 25 to 30 seconds. Small spots of flour may remain and the batter will be very thick. Do not overmix.

4. Using a large spoon or a cookie scoop sprayed with nonstick cooking spray, divide the batter amount the muffin cups. Bake until the muffins are light golden brown and a toothpick or thin knife inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean, 25 to 30 minutes, rotating the pan from front to back halfway through the baking time. Immediately remove muffins to a wire rack and cool for at least 5 minutes. Serve immediately or at room temperature. Store leftovers in an airtight container at room temperature.

No More Vacations!

Okay, okay.  I'm finished.  I'm sorry.  After my fourth week of being on vacation this summer, I think I am finally finished with long trips!  California, New Hampshire - and last week, Maine.  I have really enjoyed my time away this summer, but it's nice to be home too.  My poor little abandoned blog will be abandoned no more!

Yesterday I went blueberry picking with Kenzie, Maggie, Cathleen and Amelia when we got home from Maine.  We got back just in time to join them.  Now, my advice is not to go blueberry picking on a 90-degree day, because we all thought we were about to succumb to heat stroke right there in the field.  But it was well worth it, because we ended up with multiple pounds of fresh, juicy blueberries!  This so overwhelmed me with great baking ideas that I very well could have spent all of today browsing blueberry-y recipes, but Mom came to my rescue and asked for demanded blueberry muffins.

Now, I have made blueberry muffins before.  It was my dad's old hand-written recipe.  And don't get me wrong, they are great.  But Mom said she has always been on the lookout for the perfect blueberry muffin recipe.  She is picky (shocker) and says they must be" not too sweet", "full of berries", "no extras" (i.e. topping or lemon), "moist," and "gummy" (which I am not sure exactly what she means by that but it sounds disgusting).  So I decided to see if I could find another recipe that sounded promising.

Enter: blueberry muffin recipe from the Brown-Eyed Baker blog.  She raved about them, the pictures looked great, and the recipe was different.  You don't use a mixer.  You mix the dry ingredients together.  I know, that doesn't sound so different, but then the wet ingredients get a bit crazy.  You whisk the egg and sugar together to make a thick mixture, then whisk in melted butter and sour cream until you basically have this thick cream that gets folded into the dry mixture.  The batter is very thick, and a bit hard to mush into your muffin tin (or in my case, my beloved silicone cups), but trust me: they are worth the struggle. 

These muffins are damn good.  Lots of blueberries - a cup and a half - make them juicy and sweet, and the cake is soft and moist.  The flavor is excellent.  Mom even called them "a home run," which you should know is a very big compliment.  She even said I should keep them on hand at all times, and wants another batch baked tomorrow.  I would have made more tonight, but the recipe uses 1  1/2 cups of sour cream, and I didn't have enough.  I will be making  more though: there are only 3 left!



There are a lot of green berries in that basket...

Recipe:
blueberry muffins

Gluten-Free Sweets!

It has certainly been a crazy few days.  Thursday night I went out to eat with Mark.  We went to Michael's Harborside in Newburyport, had some calamari for dessert, and I got delicious seafood pasta.  When I got home (later than expected) I was panicking because I had to bring a hot dish to my school's volunteer appreciation breakfast.  Kenzie found me a quick and easy overnight French toast casserole.  I was going to be rather embarrassed to bring it; it looked pretty blah since it was just pieces of white bread withbrown sugar,  cinnamon, egg and milk sprinkled on it, but it was all I had time to do.  Luckily, I did not have to show up with an ugly casserole.  Unluckily, that was because I threw up early Friday morning.  I blame the calamari and think that I am now finished with squid; Mark and I have both gotten sick eating them on separate occasions.  But this meant I got to eat the casserole myself last night.  The casserole is okay; I don't really like French toast, and that is exactly what it is.  I would recommend it if you have to make French toast for a crowd, because it is an easy way to feed a lot of people at once, when French toast usually takes a while to make for everyone.

Yesterday was a bit of a culinary challenge for me.  Kenzie's friend Jane is visiting from Maui with her husband (!).  We went to their wedding last weekend, and it was great to see them again and really get to know her Matty.  The culinary challenge was that Kenzie invited them over for a tea party, and Jane has celiac disease and is gluten-free.  As I looked through my recipes, I realized I do not think I have ever cooked or baked a single gluten-free item.  In fact, my entire life revolves around gluten.  I might die if I had to go gluten-free.  With that said, I knew immediately I needed to call in the experts, so I called Kaz and Andrea.  Kaz also can't have gluten, so they were the perfect people to give advice.  They gave me the name of their favorite gluten-free baking mix - which of course Kenzie went to buy, and didn't find it.  She bought a different gluten-free flour along with some GF cookies, and I set to work attempting my first gluten-less desserts!

Last week I made those low-fat cheesecakes, and I remembered seeing a footnote about how to make them gluten-free, so I decided to make them again.  There is only a tablespoon of flour in them, so I used a tablespoon of the GF baking mix instead.  They call for vanilla wafers to be the bottom crust, but instead, Kenzie bought gluten-free ginger snaps (thanks for the tip, Andrea)!  Then I popped those in the oven and set to work on my next sweet snack.

Jane had been craving blueberry muffins.  Her stepmom had made a batch of regular ones, and when Jane tried to go to a gluten-free bakery to buy some of her own, they were closed, so I knew that this was what I had to make her.  I found a recipe for muffins on The Food Network's site; in case they turned out horrible, I couldn't bear to use my dad's recipe.  I had attempted to look up specifically gluten-free blueberry muffin recipes, but they called for bizarre things like xanthan gum.  Andrea and Kaz had said that you can use gluten-free flour just in place of regular flour, so that is what I did.  I was nervous, especially when I took them out of the oven.  They aren't that pretty, puffy white color that normal muffins are - but then again, they are not normal muffins!  We let them cool for a while, and then I passed around my gluten free cheesecakes and muffins.  Moment of truth!

And, they were a hit!  Not only did Jane get to eat desserts with the rest of us (and I didn't make her sick!), but we all ate them and liked them.  Rachael claimed they were the best muffins ever.  They  did not taste gluten-free at all.  Thank you, King Arthur's Gluten-Free Baking Mix!  I was glad that I had experimented with gluten-free baking for Jane, and now that I have a big bag of the baking mix, I will have to try that again soon.  Kaz, start getting hungry :)

To make up for my lack of gluten during the day, at night I decided I needed to make a bread.  Mom had ripped a recipe out of a magazine for overnight pull-apart cinnamon loaf.  It's a lot like monkey bread, but it looks like a loaf of bread rather than little balls.  I made the dough last night, and then had to let it rise overnight in the refrigerator.  This does confuse me a bit, because rising only happens when it is warm, right?  But okay, I'll follow the recipe.  Tonight it will be our dessert  (hopefully).  I will keep you posted.  Since Mom did cut the recipe out of Better Homes and Gardens and then promptly lost the second page, I had to find it online, so I am attaching the page I usd.

Mark and I went grocery shopping today for the ingredients for dinner tonight and tomorrow, so stay tuned for some very intriguing dinners :)

Recipes:
French toast casserole
blueberry muffins (the recipe isn't gluten free, but I substituted GF baking mix for flour)
red, white and blueberry cheesecake yogurt cupcakes (substituted GF baking mix for flour, and used GF ginger snaps as the crust)

To Daddy

When your dad is sick, small artifacts from life "Before" become incredibly important.  Coffee mugs that are way too small to fit even a Keurig coffee do not get thrown away, because they say DIGITAL on them, and Dad got them at work.  Ratty old tee shirts from his old road races or business trips become our favorite pajamas.  And anything, anything, with his handwriting on it, is crazy precious!  We don't get to see Dad's chicken scratch anymore, so short notes, grocery lists, tax calcuations, and recipes become treasured artifacts.  Tonight it was time to take a closer look at the latter. 

Dad had hand-written a recipe for blueberry muffins, and I remember them being the best muffins ever.  A few years ago, when we stumbled upon the page, Anne had it framed.  It's a mess: wrinkled, creased, stained (like all of Dad's favorite recipes!  He was a messy chef.)  It says "add vanilla" but never says how much (I did a teaspoon).  It says to add the dry ingredients alternately with the milk, but never says to mix the dry ingredients together first (thank god I ama  baking pro these days!  A newbie would have struggled here!) And yet, this sheet of paper means way more than a flashy new cookbook.  I love cooking things that Dad used to cook for us.  It makes me feel like I really am his daughter :)

It would be easier for you if I posted the recipe with my amendments, and typed it all up nice, but I am not going to.  It will mean more if you make these using Dad's words :)  Love you Daddy!

Recipe:
Dad's blueberry muffins