Take 2: Bakery style blueberry muffins

 

This recipe owes its roots to a department store in Boston, apparently a dining room tradition cherished by regulars, much like the popovers at the restaurant on the top floor of the former Dayton's in Minneapolis. 

One wonders how much of that devotion is to the remembered ritual as opposed to the treat itself. I remember feeling so grown up when I got to go to the Younkers tea room when we'd go shopping for my back-to-school wardrobe. Funny thing, though: I don't remember the food at all, just the impression of elegance. That and the gloved elevator operators.

Famous Department Store blueberry muffins
From King Arthur Baking, a clone of muffins served in the erstwhile Jordan Marsh department store in Boston.

Ingredients
8 tablespoons butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar, plus ¼ cup for topping.
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups flour
½ cup milk
2½ cups fresh blueberries

Method
Preheat oven to 375. Line or grease 12 regular size muffin tins.

In a large bowl beat butter and 1 cup sugar until well combined. Add eggs one at a time, beating after each addition. Beat in the baking powder, salt and vanilla.Add flour alternately with the milk, beating to just combined.

Mash ½ cup of the blueberries. Fold in mashed and whole blueberries.

Spoon ¼ cupfuls into prepared muffin tins. (They will be very full and definitely result in the "muffin top" style muffins.) Sprinkle remaining sugar on top. Bake for 30 minutes until light golden brown and they pass the toothpick test.

 

Rating: I can see why they were favorites. Out of the ones I made in all this round of testing, they might be mine.

 

So having found a really good recipe for bakery-style muffins, why try another? The combination of cream cheese, buttermilk and cake flour intrigued me to try this one as well.

I would say these two recipes show there's a fairly wide latitude in what constitutes a bakery muffin. One thing both of these have in common is some sort of topping. The other thing is that I'd say they're generally a step above what you get at most bakeries.

Bakery-style blueberry muffins

From “Homestead Recipes” by Amanda Rettke, as published in the Star Tribune. Note: The recipe specifies that the cream cheese, butter, eggs and buttermilk be at room temperature, so allow a bit of lead time.

Ingredients
4 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
¾ cup (1 ½ sticks) butter, at room temperature
1½ cup sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1½ cups cake flour
2 tablespoons buttermilk
1 cup blueberries

Topping
½ cup (1 stick) butter
¾ cup flour
⅓ cup powdered sugar

Method
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Line or grease 15 muffin cups.

Beat together cream cheese and butter until smooth, about 3 minutes. Gradually stir in sugar and beat until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well in between each addition. Mix in vanilla. Add flour and mix until just combined. Fold in blueberries. Divide mixture among the 15 muffin cups.

For topping, mix together butter, flour and powdered sugar. Sprinkle mixture over muffins. Bake for 27 to 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out with no wet batter clinging to it. They do not get particularly brown.

Rating: These get good marks for being a very light batter, which helps offset the density of the cream cheese. Very moist.  My only nit was that the topping didn't stick to the top particularly well, although in retrospect, I wonder if I brought that on myself in my rush to try to get these ready to take to book group. In rereading the recipe, I honestly can't remember if I put in the right amount of butter in the topping and used half a stick instead of half a cup. So I'll have to give that part a pass and try them again to make sure. I wouldn't mind.These have the plus that they taste fine at room temperature, which I can't say about most muffins.

 

 

 

 

Blueberry rhubarb corn muffins

 

The blueberries are finally ripening in my yard, which means they've been ripe in growers' gardens for a week or two. Time for a roundup of muffin recipes I've tried in the past year.

The recipe lets you take advantage of that very brief shoulder season between rhubarb and blueberry harvest time.

Blue-barb corn muffins
From Martha Stewart Living May 2022

Ingredients
1¾ cup flour
¾ cup sugar, plus more for sprinkling tops
¼ cup cornmeal
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup blueberries, divided
1 cup chopped rhubarb, divided (aim for ½-inch pieces)
2 eggs, beaten
¾ cup milk
1 stick of butter melted and slightly cooled
1 teaspoon vanilla

Method
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line or grease 12 muffin cups.

Combine flour, ¾ cup sugar, cornmeal, baking powder and salt in a large bowl. Reserve 3 tablespoons each of the blueberries and rhubarb. Stir remainder into the dry ingredients. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients. Add eggs and whisk mixture together. Combine milk, butter and vanilla and stir into batter.

Divide batter among muffin tins, about ⅓ cup each. Top muffins with remaining fruit, pressing in slightly to the batter. Sprinkle with sugar and bake for 25 to 30 minutes until tops spring back when touched. Let sit for 15 minutes before serving for easier extraction from the pan. 

Rating: Nice. Colorful and flavorful. The modicum of cornmeal gives it a really nice crumb, with a nice balance of tart rhubarb and the sugar topping. The muffins are very full and will run together a bit in the pan, and the texture is more likely to break a bit at the edges as a result, but otherwise a very admirable recipe. 

Stay tuned for a week of blueberry muffin recipes, including blueberry bran muffins, blueberry pumpkin muffins, oatmeal blueberry muffins and more.

Classic blueberry muffins

 

These fall into the category of classic muffins, nothing fancy, but very reliable and serviceable. They're the kind you give to people who grew up on muffin mix out of a box or packet, in which case they're comparatively impressive.

Blueberry muffins

From “Best Recipes from America’s Country Inns and Bed & Breakfasts” by Kitty and Lucian Maynard. This particular recipes comes from A. Drummond’s Ranch Bed & Breakfast in the Cheyenne-Laramie area of Wyoming.

Ingredients
3 cups flour
1 cup whole wheat flour (or more white flour)
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
4 eggs at room temperature
2 cups sugar
1 cup light olive oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups sour cream
3 cups fresh or frozen blueberries

Method
Line 30 muffin cups. Preheat oven to 400.

Combine flours, baking soda and powder and salt in a medium bowl. Set aside.

In a large bowl, beat eggs until well blended. Gradually add sugar while still beating. Continue beating at low speed and add in oil and vanilla.

Alternate mixing in flour and sour cream into egg mixture until well blended. Fold in blueberries.

Spoon batter into muffin cups about three-fourths of the way full. (The recipe says it makes 30; I made a half batch and wound up with 16 fairly full muffin cups, figuring not quite a ¼ cup of batter per muffin.) Bake 20 minutes.

Rating: Dave said it best: These are really good at being muffins. It was an accurate description of a very well-behaved batch of classic muffins that are a perfectly serviceable carrier for butter. They reached a nice height, had good texture, didn’t have runny blueberry bits, and parted ways with their liners most readily. They aren’t overly sweet, which sometimes muffins are. What they lacked, however, was much in the way of flavor aside from the berries themselves. I kind of thought the sour cream might have added more to the party. Maybe lemon zest would help? So all and all, I’d say they fit the mold of bed and breakfast fare: perfectly serviceable, not necessarily disappointing, but you can nearly always get as good or better at home and you don’t have to make labored conversation with strangers before caffeine has kicked in.   

Ice cream blueberry muffins

 

I'm not much into gimmicky food. Viral sensations like this one for three-ingredient muffins elude me until they appear in newsprint. In this case the Washington Post weighed in with meticulous testing of a variety of ice creams, a gluten-free option, etc. 

I, on the other hand, totally half-assed it. I didn't have self-rising flour because why would I? I confess I had always assumed that self-rising flour existed because of laziness or cabin/camp convenience, the equivalent of biscuit mix. But when I looked for the substitution, King Arthur Flour explains that this apparently Southern staple is generally made with a softer, lower protein wheat that grows in the region. Their substitution recipe is 1 cup all-purpose flour, 1½ teaspoon baking powder and ¼ teaspoon salt, but notes that for tender baked goods, you may wish to use pastry flour instead of all purpose.

By the time I made the substitution and added in the two optional ingredients, they became 7-ingredient muffins, but they're still pretty speedy to make.

3-Ingredient blueberry muffins
From Brunch With Babs on TikTok via the Washington Post.

Ingredients
1⅓ cup vanilla ice cream, softened to soft-serve stage (err on the generous side when measuring)
1 cup self-rising flour
2 teaspoons orange or lemon zest, optional
¾ cup fresh blueberries
Sugar for garnish, optional (the Post called for turbinado; I went with Demerara, but any sugar would do in a pinch)

Method
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line or grease 6 regular size muffin cups.

Mix ice cream, flour and zest in a large bowl until just combined. Fold in blueberries. Using a ¼-cup measure, divide batter among prepared muffin cups. Sprinkle with sugar, if using. Bake for 30 to 33 minutes.

Rating: I was highly skeptical, but these are actually pretty darn tasty. I went with orange zest because that's what I had on hand, and the result was a quite packed with flavor. The ice cream apparently does its job delivering the cream/sugar component. They rose to a reasonable height, and while they may not have had quite the perfect texture like these classic muffins, they worked well enough. I'm not sure I'd make them again because I don't tend to buy ice cream or self-rising flour, but if that's what you've got in the house, you could certainly do worse.

But really: What recipe makes 6 muffins? The effort-to-yield ratio seems off. The Post article did note that it works fine doubled. It also notes that they're better served fresh out of the oven, so perhaps in this case, maybe fewer is better for a small household.