It's the summer, you see. It makes me crave blueberries and strawberries and raspberries and grapes and watermelon, even if our summer so far has been.. well, lacking actual summer. Today was the first nice and sunny day in weeks and I celebrated by parking myself indoors at the hairdresser's and spending 3 hours getting my hair dyed and cut. Bad planning? Bad planning.
But then I went home and made these. Oh, how I love these. They're sweet, but not overly so, thanks to the lovely blueberries, but the crunchy sugary topping is lovely and makes biting into one a real treat!
I also made these using buttermilk. Now, this may come as a surprise to you, but here in Holland, we don't normally use buttermilk for baking. We use it for drinking. At least, we do in our family. But this idea of using it instead of milk had me intrigued. What would it taste like? Would it affect the batter? Or the scent? Is it that much thicker? Would it complement the blueberries or would it distract? The BF was sceptical, because he does not like buttermilk.
I decided to go for it. And this had little to do with the fact that the milk in my fridge went bad. Or, well, it had a lot to do with that, but that's besides the point. The BF thought the batter smelled horrible, thanks to the buttermilk, but once baked the buttermilk scent was gone. So was the taste. We both have no idea why one would use buttermilk over regular milk, though, so if anyone has an explanation, I would love to know why!
But when putting the buttermilk issues aside, I can only come to one conclusion: These muffins are delicious, and, provided there are any left, I shall be having one for breakfast tomorrow morning. With a cup of coffee.
----------------------------------------------Blueberry muffins
(makes about 12)
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cups sugar
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
2/4 to 3/4 cup buttermilk
1 cup blueberries
sugar for sprinkling
Oven: 200 C.
Line a muffin tin with liners or spray the tin with baking spray or grease it with butter.
Mix the flour, salt and baking powder in a separate bowl and set aside.
Cream butter and sugar. Add the vanilla extract and the egg and stir until smooth.
Add the milk and flour, alternating between the milk and the flour mixture until all the flour is gone. Check consistency, if it's too thick, add a bit more buttermilk. It shouldn't be runny, but it also shouldn't be cookie dough.
Add the blueberries and stir them in carefully.
Divide the batter over the liners, if your tin is like mine, you should be able to get 12 muffins out of this batch of batter.
Bake the muffins for 25 minutes or until the tops are golden and a toothpick comes out clean (or purple, if you've just stabbed it into a blueberry)
Enjoy!
Oh man, those look sooooo tasty! I love blueberries too. I buy them just to eat right out of the container.
ReplyDeleteI don't often use buttermilk to bake, myself. It seems like the one time I remember using it I made cupcakes and it kept them very moist compared to non-buttermilk cupcakes, but don't take that for fact. :)