Blueberry Muffins, The Magnificent

***Previously on Julia’s Child?... “Cath is awesome. My inspiration is back FULL FORCE!...The next morning, I was up at exactly 7 and ran to wake my mom up to take me to the grocery store…I was disappointed once again when she informed me that they didn’t open until 8 am, but I didn’t let that get my spirits too far down. I ran around the kitchen getting things prepped for when I did have my ingredients…”***
We left ten minutes before eight, with a lot of bouncing on my part and grumbling on my moms. It took us all of fifteen minutes to gather what we needed. It would have taken much longer had I not told my mom sternly that we weren’t shopping for the week, just my breakfast. On a whim (isn’t that an awesome word?), I decided I’d also make some cinnamon bread and fruit salad to accompany my muffins. In the bread section I had a little trouble choosing which type of bread I should make the cinnamon toast with. It was between Italian bread – the softer of the two with a thicker crust, and French bread – which was a courser, baguette-like bread. This is a close interpretation of what they actually looked like. Italian on the top, French on the bottom.

How do you even choose? It was a very tough call but, in the end, I chose Italian.
Finally, after an awkward greeting from a former neighbor (can you EVER go to Hiller’s and NOT see someone you know?) we were on our way back to my kitchen. I eagerly spread all my ingredients and cooking utensils out on to my kitchen counter, rolled up my sleeves, washed my hand and got to work.
At this point, I took out the directions that Cath had emailed me and read them over very carefully; I didn’t want a repeat of when I screwed up a meal simply because I didn’t read the directions beforehand. (This specific time being when I babysat for my neighbors and they asked me to make Easy Mac for the kids. Easy, right? NO. I ended up putting the milk and butter into the boiling water with the noodles instead of after they were strained. Let’s just say that we had some cheese and crackers for dinner and the mom never had me cook for them again. So, you can see why I was so diligent in my direction reading…)

Here’s the recipe and directions given by Cath:
3 cups all purpose flour
2 t baking powder
1 t fine table salt
3/4 t ground cinnamon
3/4 cup plus 2 T granulated sugar
6 T (3/4) stick unsalted butter
1 cup whole milk
3 large eggs, preferably organic
1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries (or substitute with another fruit of your choice i.e., raisins; feel free to omit as well to make plain muffins)
1. Preheat the oven to 400 F. Line a standard size muffin pan (really, any size muffin tin will do since you’re just plopping the batter into the paper cups and it’ll just give you more or less muffins depending on the size of the tin) with paper cups.
2. Sift the flour into a large bowl with the baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. Stir in the sugar. Mix in the butter using a fork or pastry blender until the mixture resembles bread crumbs (I simply use my hands to break up the butter — squeeze the butter cubes and mix it with the flour until it’s incorporated).
3. Using a fork, whisk together the milk and eggs. Whisk this liquid quickly into the flour mixture, then gently fold in the blueberries with a rubber spatula.
4. Divide the batter equally among the muffin cups. Bake the muffins in the middle of the oven for 20-25 minutes until risen and golden brown. Let cool in the pan for a few minutes before removing. Serve warm, or as soon as possible after baking.

KEY TO PERFECTION: For light as air muffins, you must mix quickly and lightly. This is especially important when making fruit muffins since there’s more mixing involved. After whisking the liquid into the dry ingredients, gently fold the blueberries through the batter using a spatula. Do this quickly and don’t try to make the batter smooth. It should be sloppy and lumpy.

I followed the directions exactly per Cath’s wise instruction: “think of cooking as art and baking as science — with cooking you can get a little free with the measurements; with baking, stick with the recipe as written or face disaster!” So, that’s what I did.
I had my dad in full photographer mode. Here are some pictures of the messy, yet delicious process of making the blueberry muffins:

Diligent instruction reading! And please don’t mind my red neck attire. :)

How crafty does this picture look? Kudos daddy!

Sloppy AND lumpy, just what the doctor ordered.

While the muffins were in the oven, I chopped up the fruit (apples, pears, bananas, strawberries, nectarines, and grapes) semi-professionally, and started to butter up the toast. Right as the muffins came out and the cinnamon toast went in, my sister came upstairs and I went to go wake my dad up. I got out some plates for the meal, cups for the juice, and the fruit salad from the fridge. Within minutes I had the muffins on a plate and ready to be served.
And, here’s the final result:

And now, a close up on the stars themselves: THE MUFFINS EVERYONE!
(the audience applauds)Yummy, yummy, yummy!

They were SO good, as agreed on by everyone who tasted them (even the ever picky Darbi).
SO: another meal successfully completed and most definitely destined to be repeated (rhyming for affect).

Lauren

***SIDENOTE (of exasperation): My computer is being really stupid and is italicizing at random the posts I put up, which is really annoying because then you can’t see where I MEANT to italicize (hence the occasional CAPS). Watch, now that I’ve said this it won’t italicize this one…spiteful little twerp.