How to make blueberry muffins

Reduced fat blueberry muffins are certainly no better—if not worse. With only slightly fewer calories than their regular counterparts, they still contain the same high amount of sugar (almost 40 grams, or 10 teaspoons) and nearly 50 percent more sodium (a whopping 540 milligrams per muffin!).

Answer: Try tossing your berries with a tablespoon or two of flour before adding them to the batter. Just remember to account for that when you mix up your dry ingredients, subtracting that same tablespoon or two from the amount called for in the recipe.

While you can use fresh blueberries in this recipe, frozen blueberries also work well. The best part it that you don’t even need to thaw them. Toss frozen blueberries in some flour to coat and prevent sticking and sinking to the bottom of the muffins.

Your oven might not be hot enough. Opening the oven door too many times to check the muffins can also make the oven lose a lot of heat and accordingly cause your muffin tops to sink as well. If you undermix the batter, it’s likely that your muffins won’t develop much structure.

Why muffins come out dry and crumbly

The main cause of dry, hard muffins is over-mixing the batter and overcooking the muffins. So the the 3 simple secrets for beautifully soft and moist blueberry muffins are: use butter AND oil -butter makes things tasty but oil makes things moist. So use both!

When the cell structure doesn’t set, the air spaces created by the leavening in the recipe collapses, causing the muffin to sink. Oven temperatures vary over time. To insure the correct temperature each time you bake, always use an oven thermometer. The oven temperature in the recipe may not have been hot enough.

Too much liquid – If there is too much liquid in the batter, the muffins will be very dense. Too much leavening – If there is too much baking soda or powder in the batter, muffins will rise temporarily, then collapse. This causes them to become dense.

Do not over mix the muffin batter.

If you over mix muffin batter then you will likely end up with dense rubbery muffins. When baking muffins you want to mix the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients and stir only until they are just combined. This step should literally take a few seconds.

Now if the muffin is slightly past its prime where it’s turned hard and stale, just preheat your oven to 350F, sprinkle the muffin with some water (yes water) and place it a PAPER bag. Fold the bag shut (leaving room for expansion) and pop it into the warm oven for 10-15 seconds.

Or you could make a clear sugar glaze and brush over muffins once they come out. Using fructose instead of sucrose. If you ever like eating them with butter, use honey butter instead of regular. Alternately, swirl in a drizzle of honey before you put them in the oven.

An undercooked muffin will have a center that is too moist and it doesn’t peak enough. Usually this is caused by the oven not being hot enough or the cooking time was too short. Assess muffins that didn’t rise much. If you’ve made substitutions to the muffin, this may also be another reason for poor rising.

Into the Oven

If you see mushy, uncooked portions in the muffins, put them back in the tins. Slide them into the oven for an additional 5 to 10 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the centers comes out clean, with just a few moist crumbs. Because undercooked muffins contain raw eggs, rebake them within 2 hours.

Beyond the Baking Toothpick Test

For example, when baking a sponge cake or a chiffon cake, you can determine doneness by touching the top lightly with your finger. If the top springs back, the cake is done. You’ll need no toothpick to test cake doneness when baking angel food cakes, either.

The best test to determine a muffin’s doneness is to insert a wooden pick into the center of one of the center muffins before removing the pan from the oven. If it comes out clean or with a few moist crumbs clinging to the pick, the muffins are done. Sometimes outer muffins bake faster than center muffins.

Bread pudding with muffins is simple to prepare. Just crumble the muffins (if they aren’t a big mess already!), mix them with eggs, milk, and sweetener, and bake! You can assemble a delicious dessert or breakfast in minutes. The next time you have a few leftover muffins turn them into something new.

Check for doneness by touching the muffin top lightly and it will spring back when ready. Or, insert a toothpick near the center (muffins, quick bread, or cornbread.) It will be free of batter when baked through.

There’s no question that the standard oven temperature of 350°F gets the job done for baking up muffins and quick breads.

Because emulsifiers hold water and fat together, adding extra egg yolks to the batter enables the batter to hold extra liquid and, consequently, extra sugar. This helps create a moister and sweeter cake that will still bake up with a good structure rather than falling into a gooey mass.