"Basic Baking" Recipe 1

Blueberry Muffins

So here's the deal... When I decided to buy a book of baking recipes and post my experiences on a blog, my original plan was to start at the beginning of the book and work through each recipe in order. (For one, the book starts with easier recipes and then gets gradually more difficult, and for two, I would know for sure that I wouldn't accidentally miss a recipe. So that was my plan, right?

Well as sometimes happens, my plans changed last week when a friend invited me to go blueberry picking with her. Now I have all these wonderful, fresh blueberries in my fridge and I thought, why let them go to waste? So I looked through the baking book I had bought and found a recipe for blueberry muffins. I just knew fresh blueberries would make the end result even tastier.

So this morning, I got up sort of early (it's summer, you know, so I wanted to get my baking in before it got too hot out) and got to work making the muffins. The ingredients for these blueberry muffins are: all-purpose flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, blueberries, eggs, milk, unsalted butter, vanilla extract and lemon zest.

I omitted the lemon zest because I didn't have any lemons in the house, but the muffins were still good without it. (The recipe made 12 medium-sized muffins and my husband ate FOUR of them, so that should say something about how tasty they were.)

As far as the cooking process, it was a fairly easy recipe to follow. It took me maybe 30 minutes to gather all the ingredients, make up the batter (it was a 3-step process), and get them into the oven. From there, it took about 20 minutes for them to bake. The only real "mishap" I had while making them was that I accidentally dropped a couple of the blueberries on the floor, thought "I'm almost done, I'll clean them up after I get these muffins in the oven", and then (of course) stepped on one. Luckily, squished blueberries are easy to clean off of tile floors.

Below is a picture of the finished product:

The recipe made 12 muffins, but some of them looked prettier than others, so I chose a few of the good-looking ones to photograph.

Now that we have had our blueberry fix, I will resume my original plan in a few days and start from the beginning when I make some "Fantasy Brownies" from Lora Brody's Basic Baking.