Brethren Blueberry Muffins

A few weeks ago I was confronted by a large container of blueberries in my refrigerator that seemed to say to me, "Hey- I know you're sick of eating me, but you CAN'T let me go to waste!"  My youngest daughter and I are the only real blueberry fans in the house and that 2 lb container of deliciously sweet blueberries was just more than we could handle.  I needed an idea to use up a lot of blueberries-- fast.

I don't have a good recipe for blueberry muffins so I decided to reinvigorate My Year of Brethren Food Project and started thumbing through my grandmother's Inglenook Cookbook.  I didn't find a recipe for blueberry muffins, but I came across a recipe for "Breakfast Muffins" and decided to use it as a starting point.  After all, I had lots of blueberries in the fridge and if I messed this up, I had plenty more to try again.

It took two attempts to come up with a blueberry muffin that everyone liked.  In the end, I came up with something that was a cross between what we know as a muffin and a scone.  My Brethern Blueberry Muffins have the texture of a biscuit, but they're much sweeter.  Sounds like a scone, right?  But they're also a little lighter than a traditional scone and less crusty because I bake them in muffin tins.  And I top them with cinnamon sugar so I don't have the heart to call them "scones".  I don't want to get hate mail from Brits who say that my recipe is nothing like a scone.  They are at best somewhat scone-like, but we think they're pretty good.

Brethren Blueberry Muffins cooling on my kitchen counter, 2011.

Brethren Blueberry Muffins
by Susan Lutz

Recipe makes 12 muffins

Ingredients:

• 1 egg
• 1 cup whole milk
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 4 tablespoons butter (melted and cooled)
• 1/2 cup blueberries (or more to suit your taste up to 3/4 cup)
• 3 tablespoons turbinado (raw) sugar for topping
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon for topping

Instructions:

• Melt butter and let cool to room temperature.
• Lightly beat one egg and add milk and sugar to combine.
• Sift together salt, baking powder, and flour and place in a medium sized bowl.  Slowly add egg/milk mixture to dry ingredients and stir.
• Gently add melted butter and blueberries and stir gently until just combined.
• Add paper muffin liners, also called baking cups, to muffin tins.  (The muffins tend to stick to the muffin tins without them.)
• Fill paper lined muffin tins three-quarters full of batter.
• In a small bowl, mix turbinado (raw) sugar and cinnamon until combined.
• Sprinkle cinnamon-sugar mix on top of each muffin.
• Bake muffins in a preheated 350 degree oven for 20 minutes.