Tag Archives: Blueberry

Blueberry Cream Cheese Coffee Cake

Muffins

When my kids were in daycare, for Mother’s Day there would be “muffins for mom” and for Father’s Day there would be “Doughnuts for Dad”. I was so jealous of “Dad”. The moms would get these large, dense, tasteless, mass produced muffins that sat in packaging for weeks. Dads would get doughnuts fresh from a local shop. So not the same!

The only muffins I really remember growing up were blueberry. I guess there were other flavors, but I don’t recall having them. Muffins had their heyday in the 1990s. There was an entire Seinfeld episode dedicated to the best part of the muffin: the top. Thanks to that episode, you can buy a muffin top pan. Who would possibly want those terrible muffin stumps? The tops were clearly the best part!! I love Seinfeld.

Muffin flavors exploded, and there was a bit of a muffin craze. No different than the cupcake phase now. Can that be over now? No one looks good eating a cupcake. It’s messy, you get frosting everywhere, and those little things are expensive! I’m really not a big fan. But, I digress.

As everyone has a muffin tin, there should be no “special equipment” required to execute this recipe. Most people now probably make cupcakes out of their “muffin pans”, but I like the old standby of blueberry muffins. Simple, elegant, and well, it’s got to be good for you, there’s blueberries in it!

This recipe is allegedly based on a Martha Stewart Recipe. The blueberry recipe currently listed on her webpage is loaded with comments asking where the old blueberry recipe went. One of the commenters kindly put the more popular “old” recipe up. I used that one as a base for the following recipe. If the recipe was so good that people were willing to print it and save it, then comment on Martha’s site about it on another recipe’s webpage, it was good enough for me! A purloined recipe! Quite the scandal!

As you can guess, it’s made two ways. One for the boy and one for the girl. She wouldn’t touch blueberries for anything.

Muffins, two ways

2 cups of all purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup whole milk

Blueberry Version (double if you aren’t making chocolate chip muffins)
1 cup of blueberries
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Chocolate Chip Version (double if you aren’t making blueberry muffins)
1 cup bittersweet chocolate chips

Topping
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

Preheat oven to 375 Degrees Fahrenheit. Line a muffin tin with baking cups or liners.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt in a small mixing bowl. Set aside.

Cream together the butter and the sugar in a large mixing bowl, until fluffy. About 3 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time until combined. Add vanilla and milk until combined.

Take 1 teaspoon of the flour mixture and use to coat the blueberries.

Using a wooden spoon, slowly stir the remaining flour mixture into the wet ingredients. Divide the batter in two. Add the lemon zest, lemon juice and blueberries to one part of the batter and the chocolate chips to the other part.

Add the batter to the muffin tin. Mix together the sugar and nutmeg and sprinkle on top of each muffin. If you have too much batter for 12 muffins, bake a second batch. I got 14 muffins out of mine.

Bake until the tops of the muffins start to brown and a toothpick comes out clean.

Sour Cream Waffles, two ways

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You may think I’ve only photographed the blueberry waffle, but no, the bottom waffle in the back is the Chocolate Chip one!

As followers of my blog may be aware I have a boy and a girl. The boy likes bold flavors. He makes hot sauce (like Tabasco) with his daddy. The girl eats in the “white” food group: potatoes, chicken, pancakes, waffles, apples, bananas, etc. with a few exceptions like salmon (because it’s pink!), hot dogs (ditto) and strawberries (almost pink!). However, my boy and girl have come to an impasse. The boy has tired of my chocolate chip waffles. He’d like a different flavor. The girl seeks no such change. There will never be anything wrong with chocolate chip waffles to her. Ever. She could have the same three meals forever: chocolate chip waffles (or doughnuts), hot dogs, and salmon. The girl never tires of the tried and true.

So, as I was looking through my fridge I noticed a container of sour cream I bought for a meal and forgot to put out. Oops. It’s about to expire,. I also have some blueberries that I bought as a snack for my son. Apparently, he found other things on which to snack. Imagine. Anyway, I asked him about blueberry waffles. He enthusiastically said yes and asked if I can add some lemon flavor to it, because he likes that combination. Ok….

At this point, the girl has stated that she will not eat blueberry pancakes. Of course she won’t. So, decide to divide the batter in half. Some for the blueberry and lemon waffles and some for the chocolate chip waffles. Oh the mess I will make!! The dishes I will do!

So, I need a waffle recipe to use up my sour cream. I don’t like wasting money on food I forgot I had! The White House Cookbook by Fannie Lemira Gillette (1887) and The Good Housekeeping Woman’s Home Cook Book by Isabel Gordon Curtis (1909) have recipes for “Cream Waffles” that use sour cream (but ironically, not cream). James Beard has a recipe in his American Cookery (1972) that is nearly the same of the aforementioned titles. I think sour cream may be have been different back then. I made the recipe and ended up with a really thick batter that wasn’t pouring anywhere, much less onto a waffle iron. So, I thinned out the batter with whole milk to make it pourable and problem solved. The waffles are really rich and very good. Even the blueberry lemon ones!! If you want to only make one type of waffle, just double the extra ingredients of the type of waffle you want to make (e.g. 2 cups of blueberries, 2 teaspoons lemon juice, and 2 tablespoons of flour).

Sour Cream Waffles, two ways

Base batter:

1 3/4 cups sifted all purpose flour (I used 1 cup all purpose and 3/4 cup white whole wheat)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons sugar
2 cups sour cream
3 eggs
6 tablespoons melted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cup whole milk

For 1/2 Blueberry and Lemon Waffles:
1 cup blueberries, rinsed
1 tablespoon flour
1 teaspoon lemon juice

For 1/2 Chocolate Chip Waffles
1 1/4 cups semisweet or bittersweet chocolate chips

Preheat waffle iron, grease iron when hot with spray oil.

Combine the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and sugar) in a large mixing bowl and whisk together until combined and aerated.

In a separate, smaller mixing bowl, whisk together the sour cream, eggs, butter, vanilla extract, and 1 cup of the milk.

Stir the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. If the batter is too think, add the remaining milk in parts until the right consistency is achieved. Divide the batter in half and separate.

Blueberry and Lemon Waffles:

In a small bowl, combine the blueberries with the flour, coating the blueberries well. Gently fold the blueberries and the lemon juice into half of the batter and cook according to your waffle iron’s instructions.

Chocolate Chip Waffles:

Stir the chocolate chips into the remaining 1/2 of the batter and cook according to your waffle iron’s instructions.

Blueberry Sour Cream Quick Bread

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I’m not a big bread person, but I had such a good time with the #twelveloaves challenge last month, I decided to do it again. This month, the theme is berries. Generally speaking, I don’t like cooked berries. They tend to be mushy and cloying. I love berries in their raw, full, ripeness. The one exception, however, is blueberries. Blueberries raw are tart and lack the mouth feel of a good strawberry. But cooked, they are a beautiful purple explosion in the middle of what is usually a pale yellow confection.

Blueberry muffins are seriously my favorite muffins. I know, how retro, not cool like scones, I suppose. Can I rant? Muffins have become these gargantuan bakery items with every single imaginable flavor foisted upon it. Remember when chocolate chip muffins were a big deal? Now, it’s double chocolate chip muffins with cayenne or sea salt caramel or some such awful twist. I saw a maple bacon muffin. Seems a little “try hard”. Meanwhile, what makes a good bakery product seems to get lost in the quest for unique flavor. Sure, the muffins are huge, but they are likely a dry mess with an overly big top that comes easily apart from the bottom. Not hardly worth the $2 they are charging for them. Rant over.

Quick breads are so called because they don’t use yeast, thus no need to wait for a “rise”. Using yeast as a leavening agent was slow and not always consistent. As chemistry was applied to cooking, someone thought to combine baking soda with an acid like lemon juice, buttermilk, or vinegar and a little heat to give “rise” to cakes and breads. Thusly creating rise with no yeast. The “rise” of the quick breads starts around the mid 18th century. Without this step forward, brownies, cakes, and some cookies would really not be made. As time progressed, chemists worked to create a powder that combined the base and the acid, but that didn’t react until instigated by the presence of a liquid. Baking powder (baking soda and a powdered acid like cream of tartar) in its various brand incarnations (Rumford, Calumet, Clabber Girl, etc.) was born. If you have ever wondered why recipes have both baking powder and baking soda, you’ll probably see elsewhere in the recipe an acid. If so, the recipe is adjusting the baking powder downward because baking soda alone will react with the acid. No need to make the dish unpleasantly bitter with acid in both the baking powder and the acidic ingredient.

Could I translate the parts that I love from my muffin recipes into quick bread? Plus, I have some sour cream in my fridge that I need to get rid of before it expires, could I include that?

I could. And I did.

I love the combination of blueberry and citrus. Round out the flavors with bourbon vanilla and this is my ideal flavor profile for blueberry muffins.

Blueberry Sour Cream Quick Bread

2 cups and 1 teaspoon All Purpose Flour, used separately
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 tablespoons butter
1 cup sugar
1 large egg
1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup milk
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon bourbon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon orange zest
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1 cup blueberries

Streusel topping
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons of flour
2 tablespoons of butter

Grease a 9×5 loaf pan and set aside
Preheat oven to 375

Combine the flour, baking powder and salt in a mixing bowl, whisk or mix briefly to aerate. Add the butter and sugar and beat until the butter is in small pieces.

In a separate mixing bowl, combine the egg, sour cream, milk, honey, vanilla and zests. Mix until well combined. Pour the liquid mixture into the dry mixture. Mix the dry and wet mixtures until they are just combined. This will look really dry.

In a small bowl, combine the remaining 1 teaspoon of flour and blueberries. Toss blueberries until well coated.

Gently fold the blueberries into the batter. Pour the batter into the loaf pan. Combine all the ingredients for the streusel topping and place on top of mixture.

Bake at 375 for about 60 minutes. Check at intervals after 45 minutes to avoid overcooking.

Really dry looking batter!

Dusting the berries with flour keeps them all from sinking to the bottom.

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