Blueberry Muffin

I needed to make breakfast because I have nothing quick to eat in the morning. Since I'm not a morning person, I need a breakfast on the go. Also, I don't want to buy breakfast because it's usually not healthy.

I used a recipe from The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book. As I said in a previous post, it's my favourite recipe book. I've made at least over 6 recipes and they have all been great.



Anyways, back to my muffin. First I greased my muffin pan. I usually use the butter wrap to grease. I guess it would be easier to buy spray...


I bought a big bucket of blueberries from Costco. I dunno...every summer I buy lots of blueberries but I tend to bake with them than eat them fresh.




The America's Test Kitchen suggest to coat the blueberries with flour. This is to prevent the blueberry juice turning the muffin purple and having the blueberries sink to the bottom of the muffin.



To prevent gluten from forming, mix dry ingredients separately from wet ingredients. Gluten forms when flour is over mixed with wet ingredients. The bad thing about gluten forming is that you have bread like texture or tough muffins.

The dry ingredients include flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt.


The wet ingredients include yogurt. However I have no yogurt so I replaced it with sour cream. Yogurt/sour cream is suppose to make baked goods moist. I was also suppose to add lemon zest but the lemon I saw at Urban Fare looked terrible so I had no choice but to use lemon juice.



Add 2 eggs to the sour cream...



And mix...



Now this is the part I often fail, the folding of wet ingredients into dry ingredients without over mixing.


I'm used to a more wet batter for muffins so when folding, it seem like there wasn't enough liquid to properly mix so I think I might of over mixed.

After mixing, add melted butter and folded again.


Because I've already mixed so much, it made it worse when I added blueberries since it required folding AGAIN just to evenly distribute the blueberries in the batter.



After I put 1/3 cup of batter in the muffin tin.



And bake....Let it cool in pan, remove from pan and cool.



Final Thoughts:
Hmm...I finally realize why some muffin recipes don't impress me because rather than a muffin texture, I get a cakey texture. It's because I overmix and gluten is formed.

In this case, the same thing happened. The muffin wasn't very "muffiny" texture but cakey. I think I over mixed. I actually knew that when I was folding the wet and dry ingredients and blueberries because it started to feel stiff.

I will try this recipe one more time but at this time, I'm just ok with this recipe. I think it's the first recipe in this book that hasn't impressed me but then again, the fault may lie with me and not the recipe.

Also this recipe used 1/2 cup of butter. Yes, this recipe makes 16 muffins, so 1/2cup butter for 16 muffins isn't too bad but 1/2cup is still 1/2 cup and that's still too much.


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