Blueberry Muffins

When my in-laws were here last time my mother in-law brought us some wild blueberries I used some that day in the Brandy and Blueberry Demi Glace. It was really good, but only went with the Duck that Kris wasn't going to eat (she and her mom had chicken). Then she suggested that I make something that everybody would eat with the rest of the blueberries that she picked. So I put them into the freezer and left them for weeks because after duck sauce what do you use blueberries for?

I mention often that pastry isn't my thing, it is too precise. I treat a recipe as a list of suggestions that worked well for someone else; when you get to using leaveners of any sort you really have to measure. Against my better judgment I decided to make Blueberry muffins during my few days off. first off I pulled out the old McCall's Cookbook, I assume that I got it from my mom, it was printed in 1963 the cover is mostly intact but the pages are brittle and yellow with age, the binding is altogether gone but it has the treasured flapjack recipe and one for banana bread that I use along with about 5 others inside it's 1000 pages so I can't let it go. Yesterday morning I got up early and followed, to the letter, the Blueberry Muffin recipe. It took about 45 minutes from beginning until I pulled them out of the oven. They resembled hockey pucks in every way but color and couldn't have tasted worse if I had made them using sawdust and other sweepings from the garage floor instead of flour and sugar.

Look at them... hard dry blech!



OK stubborn as I can be when everybody went to bed last night I started searching the Internet for another recipe, you know the kind that you can actually eat. Then I actually had to read reviews because I only have today off before I am expected back at work. Anyway I did find one with 35 reviews and a 4.5 star rating! So again this morning while my coffee was brewing I made another batch of Blueberry Muffins (from allrecipes.com):

1 1/2 cup sifted Flour
3/4 cup Sugar
1/2 tsp Kosher Salt
2 tsp Baking Powder
1/3 cup Vegetable Oil
1 Egg
1/3 cup (about) Milk
1 cup frozen Blueberries

Topping:
1/2 cup Sugar
1/3 cup Flour
1/4 cup Butter
1 1/2 tsp Cinnamon

Preheat oven to 400 and grease muffin tin

Mix all ingredient for the topping together your fingers until pea sized crumbly bits form and set aside.

Combine dry ingredients then in a 1 cup measuring cup put 1/3 cup Vegetable Oil, 1 Egg then fill with milk to make 1 cup. Add that to the dry ingredients then mix until almost blended then add the Blueberries and fold.

Fill the Muffin cups to the top (I wanted mine to look like the Muffins at Starbucks only without the $5.95 price tag) then top with the topping blend.

Turns out that is about 4 times the amount of topping that you actually need if you want to cut it back that is fine you do the math, I have done enough with measuring today.

When these came out of the oven they were wonderful, they tasted lovely, the were light and fluffy and the house smelled like it should after baking not like yesterday when the kitchen smelled almost like the day I set the spatula on fire.