I can honestly say that I’ve rarely met a blueberry muffin I couldn’t be best friends with. I’m not fond of dry cakey muffins but add a few blueberries and I’ll eat one. A muffin makes my cup of coffee 100 times better.
This particular recipe has a funny (sick humor) story for me. Those of you who thought I was a nice person, be prepared. When I was about 17 I got up early and made muffins very much like these. My sister was home from college and I thought it would be great to show her how clever I was. I was younger, she was already at college, had spent a summer in Europe and I was eager for her to think I was good at something.
The difference in those muffins and these? In Maine we had heaps of frozen wild blueberries – those tiny sweet blue pearls.
When we were growing up, my mother never got up early. She worked really hard cooking a big lunch and an even bigger dinner and doing all the other things that mothers do so she left the job of getting the three of us up in the morning to my father. He loved it, she slept and it was all good.
My mother woke up when she smelled the muffins and came down to the kitchen in her nightgown. The three of us sat down at the table for coffee and a muffin.
Instead of asking for one of us to pass the milk creamer to her, she reached across the table and when she did she dunked a breast into her boiling hot cup of coffee. I know, it sounds awful and it was. She should have gone to a doctor but instead suffered for days and got on by stuffing a silk scarf into her bra.
You’re feeling really bad, right? That’s how my sister and I should have felt but we didn’t. We were horrid and we laughed. We didn’t just go ha-ha, we roared. We couldn’t imagine not knowing where her nipple ended and the coffee began.
The angrier my mother got, the funnier the two of us thought it was. Then my 16 year old brother came in and he thought it was funny. It wasn’t!
Poor Mom was really uncomfortable. When my father came home for lunch all he could say was, “Don’t you know where those things are at all times?”
Okay, that was enough to start us in again. For this, I unreservedly apologize to my mother if she’s reading this from the afterlife.
Have you ever thought something was really funny even if it was as inappropriate as this? What triggers the memory?
To this day I can’t eat a blueberry muffin without thinking about this or write about it without laughing. I know it probably means I’m going to hell in a handbasket for it. I’m sorry.
Okay, I WANT to be sorry.
- ⅓ cup vegetable oil
- 1 egg
- ⅓ cup milk
- 1 cup fresh blueberries
- 1½ cups all-purpose / plain flour
- ¾ cup sugar
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- ½ cup white sugar
- ⅓ cup all-purpose flour
- ¼ cup butter, cut into small pieces (I grated very cold butter
- Zest from two lemons
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C) and grease muffin tin or use paper liners.
- Combine 1½ cups flour, ¾ cup sugar, salt and baking powder in a bowl and whisk to mix.
- In a 1-cup measuring cup, add vegetable oil, the egg and enough milk to fill the cup. Lightly mix to break the egg.
- Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix til nearly all the flour is combined. Add blueberries and fold them into the batter.
- Fill muffin cups right to the top, and sprinkle with crumb topping mixture.
- In a medium sized bowl, mix together ½ cup sugar, ⅓ cup flour, ¼ cup butter, and the lemon zest.
- Mix with fork, and sprinkle generously over muffins before baking.
- Bake for 20 to 25 minutes in the preheated oven, or until done.