What We Cook: Cinnamon-Sugar-Dipped Blueberry Muffins ~ page 295

Our Cookbook Blog

Our Cookbook ~ What We Cook, is a compilation of every recipe we (Janice and Carissa) cook - recipes from our cookbook collections, our recipe boxes, and our heads! We set up this blog for friends and family who have our cookbook to let them see pictures we post of the recipes in the book, and also for us to note any corrections, revisions, or additions to What We Cook. We encourage people who are cooking our recipes to let us know how the recipes turn out and any suggestions they might want to make.

In addition, we will be sharing some of our new recipes (along with pictures) that are not in our cookbook. We hope you will help us out and test recipes and give us your comments.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Cinnamon-Sugar-Dipped Blueberry Muffins ~ page 295

I have my granddaughter, Evelyn, visiting me, so I wanted to make my blueberry muffins just a little bit healthier for her. So I made a few changes (just for today) in this scrumptious recipe. Of the two blueberry muffin recipes in the cookbook, this one has a bit less butter and sugar anyway, so I chose this one for breakfast today. I switched out 1/2 cup of the flour for whole wheat, and used yogurt (because I didn't have sour cream anyway). And I added a couple tablespoons wheat germ to the dry mix. I didn't have a lemon on hand--so no lemon peel (zest) this time, which is sad, as it adds a nice bright taste.

One last "health addition" I made, was to skip the butter/sugar dipping at the end. (This is the topping from page 294) Instead, I tried just doing a light sprinkling of cinnamon-sugar mixture over the muffins before baking. At the end of the cooking time, I experimeneted with running a stick of butter over the muffin tops to moisten, then sprinkling on the cinnamon-sugar. That worked well also, and delivered a smaller amount of extra butter and sugar than what the recipe calls for. Normally, when dipped in butter, this muffin gets a really thick layer of butter-sugar on the top--which is lovely, but not what I wanted today.

Now, for a few techniques and tools I used:

I like to get up early in the mornings, and get my muffins all assembled up to the last step of combining dry with wet ingredients. Everything can sit like this for at least 30 minutes or so, while waiting for the sleepyheads to wake up. Note that the frozen blueberries are mixed with the dry ingredients to coat the berries, and keep them from sinking to the bottom. When I am ready, I simply pour the wet ingredients into the dry.

I have a handy little gadget here that is made to combine muffin mixture without over-stirring it. (I don't even think Carissa has seen this new gadget!) Muffins are to be just barely mixed.

This is an ice cream scoop that works perfect for distributing batter to all the muffin cups without getting globs of batter on the top of the pan.

I hope you see that most recipes are not hard and fast rules. You can change them up here and there to meet your needs and taste! I thought these turned out great--and my picky granddaughter ate 2 of them and begged for another one after her lunch today!