Blossoming Blueberry Muffins

Its finally pretty reliably sunny in Amherst, which is wonderful. I absolutely love summer. Bright dresses, swimming in the sunshine, and eating fistfuls of fresh fruit until you feel almost a little ill, what else could you want?
Needless to say, I had plenty of blueberries in the fridge, so this was perfect. I also happen to love crumbles, and everyone seems to agree with that, so that felt undoubtedly necessary.

Tuesday mornings the engineering students have a morning meeting, which is my perfect excuse to make tasty breakfast foods. Two weeks ago, I went with this epic chocolate walnut coffee cake. 

It went over pretty well, but as everyone was leaving, one guy jokingly shouted back at me "hey! Next week can we have blueberry muffins" and walked away chuckling.

Oh. Random guy. Of course you can.

So I foodgawkered (one of my favorite verbs, like googled, but tastier) blueberry muffins and mixed up a recipe based on several others. If you haven't seen foodgawker, just do it. I almost renamed this blog Over-thought and Under-cooked because of the discrepancy between the amount of time I spend drooling over recipes I desperately want to try on that site and the amount of time I spend actually making them.

Blueberry Muffins with an Oatmeal Crumble

Muffins:

3 C. All Purpose Flour

3/4 C. Granulated Sugar

1/4 C. Brown Sugar

1 tablespoon Baking Powder

1/2 teaspoon Baking Soda

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 C. low fat sour cream

1 Banana, mashed

2 large Eggs

8 tablespoons Butter, melted and cooled

1 package Blueberries (or other berries if you prefer)

Oatmeal Crumble:

3/4 C. Quick-cook oats

1/4 C. All Purpose Flour

1 C. Brown Sugar

4 Tablespoons Butter, melted

• Preheat oven to 375
• In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugars, baking powder, and baking soda. Ensure that there are no clumps of brown sugar.
• In a separate bowl, mix the eggs, sour cream, and vanilla extract.
• Gently fold the wet ingredients into the flour mixture, being careful not to over-blend as it will make the muffins less light and fluffy.
• Mash the banana very well (a perfect use for those older and brown bananas) and gently add to the mixture. The older the banana, the more richer the banana flavor will be.
• Coat the blueberries in flour so they won't sink to the bottom of the muffins, and fold in until just evenly dispersed.
• Grease a muffin tin, or prepare a pan with muffin tins. The blueberries have a tendency to ooze a bit of juice onto the tin which can be very difficult to get off. Its probably best to grease the pan along the rim of each cup a bit even if you use muffin tins.
• Using an ice cream scoop (~1/3 C.), put the batter into each of the cup. It should make about 12 muffins, though I actually ended up with about 14 so I ended up baking a second tiny batch to use up the last bit of very delectable batter. For these last two I actually threw in a handful of oatmeal into the batter in addition to throwing the crumble on top.
• Now for the crumble: Mix together the ingredients and don't be afraid to use your hands a bit to really blend it all together. Crumble it over each of the muffins, pushing the pieces slightly into the batter so they won't fall off when the muffin expands
• Bake for 20-25 minutes or until slightly golden on top. Let cool in pan for a few minutes before transferring them to a wire rack.

As they baked, my apartment began to smell like like delicious blueberries. It felt more like a late Saturday morning than a late Monday night, but my roommates did not seem to mind in the slightest as they came through the kitchen in anticipation of the morning meeting where these things could finally be devoured.

These really puff up on top, which only emphasizes the utter importance of the oatmeal crumble.  Plus the giant blueberries made the juiciest little mountains beneath the it. 

The big bowl of muffins was happily consumed by all the engineers that I still don't know, and it made for a much more enjoyable early morning meeting.

And to all you Seinfeld fans out there, I can't think of a better recipe to use to say . . .

Top of the Muffin to You!

Dark Chocolate Strawberry and Blueberry Truffles

I've always been bad at these kinds of things. Journals, diaries, blogs... I start them with high hopes and with unimaginable speed forget completely and the writing goes on hiatus for an incredible amount of time. The concept of In Between Classes became much more difficult this past semester when baking went from an in between classes type thing to more of a "baking until 3am and falling asleep covered in powdered sugar and frosting" activity. But, now I am in Amherst, MA doing an engineering research program for the summer and have a lot more free time as this is solely a 9-5 thing. Thus, there is far more time for adventuring in my makeshift dorm-style kitchen. It's been keeping me nice and busy, and I thought why not see if I can keep this blog up for a little while longer than the one and a half posts I had before. Here we go....

One of the greatest things about Western Mass. is the abundance of farms providing us with fresh fruits and veggies. We went strawberry picking the other day thinking it would take us an hour or two and we'd get one big crate of strawberries. Wrong. We got 3 crates of bright beautiful and juicy strawberries, totaling in over 20lbs. This after only 20 minutes of picking, it was absurd.

With this many strawberries, it actually becomes a bit of a challenge to find interesting ways to use them all before they go bad, which is happening a bit too quickly. It's turned into a Stawberryfest 2011, complete with

Homemade shortcake with fresh whipped cream and strawberries

Strawberry Basil Scones

Lemon Pepper Salmon with Balsamic Mango and Strawberry Salsa

Mango, Blueberry, and Strawberry Oatmeal Crumble

I feel as though I'm on Iron Chef and the secret ingredient is strawberries.

The only way I could justify my most recent splurge - a giant block of excellent belgian dark chocolate - was by using it in some way as a gift. Some family friends drove me to a harp recital in Harvard, MA last week and I got to see old harpist friends. This was the perfect gift-meriting action. On J's Kitchen, I found this recipe that continued my strawberry trend and would also use my new and decadent chocolate. I had some blueberries as well that I decided to add in as another type of filling for some variety.

The one time I tried truffles in the past, I was chilling the mixture in the fridge and accidentally dropped it when pulling it out, thus breaking the glass bowl and ruining the truffles. That traumatic event prevented a second attempt for the past year and a half, but this time I came prepared with a metal bowl and was determined to not pull one of these (I don't even understand why Canadians are playing football in the first place...)

So I embarked on my second truffle journey, armed with my beaming strawberries, blueberries, a massive block of chocolate, and loads of determination.

This is just the type of recipe I hate, however, because it involves a lot of waiting, and the waiting game sucks. Thankfully, I started these late one night so I just let the truffle mix sit over night and did not have to worry about finding something more fun to occupy my time, like

The Best Alternative to the Waiting Game

Even after chilling for an extended period of time, rolling the truffles with my hands proved more difficult than anticipated.  They were gooey balls of chocolate with what was soon to be a mystery filling of either strawberry or blueberry cream cheese. I tried to keep track but failed miserably, which only made the eating part more unpredictable and thrilling!

Truffle globs, primed for another long period of chilling in the fridge

The next morning I dusted them all with cocoa powder and tried to snap some pictures before heading to work and delivering the majority of the truffles. I was self conscious about how they turned out, and my solution in this case is always the tried and true taste test, which was a nice 8am pick me up. I sliced one open and found the blueberry filling.



They weren't quite the texture I was hoping for, because I think I accidentally used too much cream, but were nonetheless profoundly decadent.

So I threw them on a little plate and brought them with me to work where I promptly put them in the freezer to harden up more. This actually worked quite well and by the time I delivered them at lunch, they were much more truffle-like.

All in all this proved to be a most delicious way to use up a few more strawberries and make a gracious thank you treat for some very kind people. 

Dark Chocolate Truffles with Cream Cheese-Strawberry Filling
makes 12
For the truffles:
120 gr dark chocolate, coarsely chopped
60 gr heavy cream

1. Place chopped chocolate in a medium bowl.
2. Bring cream to boil in a small saucepan, then remove from heat. Pour over chopped chocolate and stand for 3 minutes. Stir until smooth, then cover with a plastic wrap and refrigerate until firm (I left them overnight).

For the filling: 
8 strawberries, thinly sliced 
4oz cream cheese, softened
10 gr caster sugar

1. Preheat oven to 120C. Line a baking sheet with baking paper.
2. Arrange strawberry slices on prepared pan in a single layer. Dry in preheated oven for 1-1 1/4 hour (until crispy). For the blueberries, I just cut them in half and put them on the pan too. They won't dry out completely, but it is okay. Cool completely.
3. Finely crush dried strawberries, then mix with cream cheese and caster sugar. Refrigerate for 30 minutes to firm up
4. Roll filling mixture into 12 balls. Refrigerate until truffle mixture is ready to use, put in freezer for last 5 minutes before coating in mixture

Assembly:
1. Coat each cream cheese-strawberry or blueberry ball with truffle mixture. Do this quickly as the truffle mix tends to melt the longer you handle it. Wash off your hands every few truffles and dry completely, then roll the next set. Refrigerate until firm, freeze for a few minutes if necessary

2. Roll in cocoa powder. Refrigerate until ready to serve.