Berry Muffins

Don’t you love hot muffins fresh out of the oven? So do I! They are so warm and inviting, invoking feelings of comfort and happiness. Ok, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but really, they are very nice to eat.

My husband had friend coming from out of town this morning to visit just for the day. He was to arrive in the morning and honestly, I didn’t have anything planned. I didn’t know what we were going to be doing or where we were going. All of a sudden I remembered my recent post, Housewife Hospitality, and thought “What am I doing?! How can I not have at least something small to offer him?” Yeesh. What kind of hospitality is that? So it was about half an hour before he was due to arrive when I decided to whip up a batch of muffins. I didn’t want to make banana muffins again and I conveniently had just frozen some blueberries so decided to make some berry muffins. Here is the recipe.

2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
1-1/2 cups fresh or frozen blueberries or raspberries
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup sour cream
½ cup oil
1 tsp vanilla

Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Gently toss berries in dry ingredients to coat. In a separate bowl, combine eggs, sour cream, oil and vanilla. Add dry ingredients to wet and stir just until moist.
Fill greased muffin cups about 2/3 full and bake at 400 for 20 minutes or until a toothpick in the middle comes out clean.

These were so easy and were hot out of the oven just in time for his arrival.
Now, I have to say, when I make muffins for us to snack on or to send with my husband to work, I always make healthy substitutions. When I am making treats for guests or special occasions, I will often make the recipe as is, even if it does not seem as healthy. It’s a treat, right? If I were to make the above recipe healthier, I would replace one cup of white flour with one of whole wheat flour, replace the oil with unsweetened applesauce, and use plain, whole milk yogurt in place of sour cream. Actually, I did use yogurt this morning because I didn’t have sour cream.

Since this was a treat, I even added a streusel topping to the muffins. To do this I combined 3 tablespoons flour, 3 tablespoons oatmeal, 2 tablespoons brown sugar, 1/8 teaspoon cinnamon, and then cut in 2 tablespoons cold butter until crumbly. I sprinkled these on the muffins before baking and it was just perfectly delicious.

So there you have it! You can easily be hospitable on the fly, and for me, baking is always fun. As I mentioned above, I used blueberries that I had recently frozen. If you are interested in freezing your own berries, check out an article I wrote for the website The Untrained Housewife called How to Freeze Berries.