Frantic: Berried Muffins

I work with a woman who can’t spell, and isn’t much for proofreading, either. She pretty much accepts whatever option Spellcheck offers her first, resulting in some rather amusing sentence constructions. And Spellcheck doesn’t catch homonyms. Knowing my love of that kind of linguistic lunacy (it’s the dorky English major in me), my coworkers forward me the best examples. Thus it was one day that I got an email forward in which my poor-spelling, non-proofreading coworker profusely thanked another coworker for her help.

“I really appreciate it,” her email ran, “I’m berried.”

OK, well I thought it was funny.

Anyway, because I myself am “berried” today (and this week, and next week, and oh did I mention my daughter is home today with a stomach virus? The fun never stops!) here’s a fast recipe for blueberry muffins that I think has just taken its place in my canon of cookery as my go-to muffin recipe. Tasty, fast to whip up, versatile, and not even all that bad for you, relatively speaking (I did the math, and each muffin has about a teaspoon of butter in it, plus you can use low fat milk, and there’s only one egg).

I use dried blueberries, but you could stir in ¾ of a cup of any chopped dried fruit, or fresh fruit. I would think you could even use things like mini chocolate chips with great success as well, although I haven’t tried this yet.

So without further ado, here’s the recipe.

Berried Muffins
adapated from The Hood Basic Cookbook
makes 12 muffins at top speed

2 cups flour
½ teaspoon salt
2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1/3 to ½ cup sugar
1 egg
¾ cup milk
¼ cup melted butter
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
¾ cup fruit

Preheat oven to 425.

Combine dry ingredients in a bowl. Combine wet ingredients in a separate bowl. Mix the two together gently. Stir in fruit. Batter will be lumpy; don’t over mix.

Spoon batter into 12 greased muffin cups. Bake 12-20 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean (baking time will be dependent on the size of your muffin cups—mine take about 15 minutes; your mileage may vary).

Failed Muffins

Here's a recipe you won't be getting. The recipe was for blueberry muffins, which I made as dried cherry/dried blueberry muffins, but which clearly failed miserably. I have no idea why. My husband thinks it's because of that "weird" baking powder I insist on using. I make my own using cream of tartar and baking soda, which makes single acting baking powder, which wouldn’t cause this kind of an explosion. In fact, what should have happened is that they shouldn’t have risen enough using single acting baking powder.

I made them exactly as the recipe described. The only thing I can think of is that someone (who shall remain nameless, but let’s just say he has the same initials as my husband), put self-rising flour in the flour jar, instead of plain unbleached flour. It could happen, and then there would have been twice as much leavening in the muffins. But we’ve made cookies and other things with that flour recently, and not had this kind of weird rising problem, so I just don’t know.

In any case, the muffins were a total failure, and I was sort of pissed off to tell you the truth, because I had dumped and entire bag of dried cherries in them. Dried cherries, if you’ve never bought them, are not cheap. At my grocery store they go for about four bucks a bag. I was doubly bummed, because they looked so great in the picture that accompanied the recipe, and I was really looking forward to them.

Sorry, but you’ll have to live without a blueberry muffin recipe for today. When I get my New England Cookbook by Brooke Dojny out of its box, I’ll post her recipe for blueberry muffins, which were outstanding.