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!