One of America’s most loved baked goods is also one of the easiest to make.  Today, we’re focusing on a basic, reliable blueberry muffin recipe.  It takes about 10 minutes to prepare and 20 minutes to bake.  That’s right.  We’re talking about oven-fresh blueberry muffins in a half hour.

After we examine the basic recipe, I have a few tips and simple adjustments to make this good thing even better.

As shown in the recipe card above, the ingredients are:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1 Tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 large egg
• 1 cup milk
• 1/2 cup butter – melted
• 1 cup blueberries

The trick to making these muffins tender is mixing the dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately.  When you combine the two mixtures, use a gentle touch and mix only until the dry ingredients are moistened.  Over-mixing will make the muffins slightly tough.  (Although in truth, you can beat the bejesus out the batter and still get decent muffins.)

The same gentle technique goes for folding in the blueberries.  Take your time and mix just until the berries are evenly distributed in the batter.

For dolloping batter in muffin cups, I swear by my trusty ice cream scoop.  It fills the muffin cups almost exactly 3/4 full, which is ideal for this recipe.

Always test for doneness.  After 20 minutes, insert a toothpick in the center of a muffin.  If it comes out clean (no batter), the muffins are done.  If they need a few more minutes, consider covering the tops of the muffins with foil so they don’t get overly browned.

Now that you know the most rudimentary, reliable recipe, here’s few ways to make it even better:

Use vanilla.  I add vanilla to almost every baked good I make.  Even if you don’t notice it directly, it adds a nuance that just makes everything a step better.  One teaspoon of vanilla works great for this recipe.  Just mix it in with the wet ingredients.

Try cake flour.  Mixing a little cake flour in with all-purpose flour gives muffins a somewhat softer texture.  I find that muffins with cake flour are even better the day after they’re made.  The muffins condense more and feel more indulgent.  For this recipe, try replacing 1/2 cup of the all-purpose flour with cake flour.

Sift.  Whether you use straight-up all-purpose flour or the combo suggested above, sifting (or aerating) the flour can make a big difference.  The bit of air that gets mixed into the flour helps the muffins rise to form a beautiful dome.  I’ve kitchen tested this several times and muffins made with sifted flour always have a better shape.  That said, these muffins could turn out flat as pancakes and they’d still be delicious.

Try yogurt.  Before you measure out your cup of milk, consider trying this… empty out one of those single serve yogurt cups into your measuring cup.  Top it off with milk until it reaches the 1 cup mark.  Using a little yogurt as part of the milk component ensures that your muffins will be extremely moist.  A ratio of 1/2 milk to 1/2 yogurt is an equation for success.  I’ll often use vanilla-flavored yogurt (with additional vanilla extract).  Plain yogurt works fine, but do yourself a favor and have fun with it.  For extreme blueberry muffins, use blueberry-flavored yogurt.

Try sour cream.  Treat sour cream the same way that you’d use yogurt above.  It adds a richness to the muffins (due to its fat content) and a slight tanginess that many people enjoy.

Get zesty.  In the world of fruit, blueberries and citrus are terrific buddies.  Adding a mere 1/2 teaspoon of fresh lemon zest or orange zest to the batter dramatically changes the flavor profile of the muffin, making it – for lack of a better word – zesty!  The blueberries taste more lively because they have another fruity flavor to play with.  I like to sprinkle the zest over the dry ingredients right before I mix in the egg and milk mixture.

That concludes our blueberry muffin lesson for the day.  Let me know what you think.  If you have any tips or tricks of your own that you’d like to share, please do so in the comments section below.

May your berries be sweet and your muffins always moist!

Peach, Banana & Pecan Pancakes – With chopped pecans, mashed banana and pieces of fresh peach, these hearty, flavorful pancakes are a perfect way to celebrate peach season. I served my pancakes with homemade peach syrup (see below) and even more peaches.  It’s a peach explosion!

Peach Waffles – Waffles are wonderful, but they might be best when they’re full of peaches and topped with more peaches swimming in peach syrup with a dollop of whipped cream for a final touch.

Peach Pancake Syrup – The pancakes and waffles above were both served with this easy-to-make homemade peach syrup.  See the recipe for additional suggestions to make Peach Maple Syrup and Peach Nectarine Syrup.

Peach Smoothie - One of the best ways to appreciate a peach at the height of the season is to toss it in a blender and drink it down.  This particular smoothie combines a fresh peach with orange juice and vanilla yogurt.  Add a banana for even more flavor.

Almond Peach Muffins - Did you know peaches and almonds are in the same family (the genus Prunus)?  Maybe that’s why they taste so great together.  This beauty has chopped peaches and chopped almonds in a vanilla batter.  I sprinkled some additional almonds over them at the end to add some crunch and make them pretty. One might say, “Pretty as a peach.”

Pecan Peach Muffins - This is my particular favorite of the recipes on this page.  I made it for the first time a few weeks ago and I haven’t been able to get enough since.  The peach cake batter is fantastic and the pecan and brown sugar crumble is to die for.  A little bit of the crumble sinks into the batter as it bakes, producing a great caramelized flavor in every moist bite.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Here are 10 more peach breakfast ideas:

Peaches And Cream Oatmeal

Baked Peach French Toast

Peach-Nut Coffee Cake

Peach Bellini Brunch Cocktail

• Peach Cobbler Oatmeal
• Peach Crepes
• Easy Peach Crisp with Cereal Topping
• Baked Peach Pancakes
• White Peach Bourbon French Toast
• Peach French Toast

If you try any of the recipes, be sure to leave a comment on that recipe’s page or drop me a note here.  Here’s hoping you have a peachy keen day!  I’ll leave you with this…

“Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.” – Alice Walker (American author and poet)

National Eat A Peach Day is August 22.

In this era of extreme political correctness, one is never sure when it’s okay to say “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays”.  Thankfully, there is one holiday greeting we can all agree on… Joyous Eggnog Season! It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

I always get excited when my local grocery stores start stocking eggnog in late fall.  That first swig of the year is liquid magic.  The creamy, rich taste of the holidays puts a smile on my face.  And you should see how happy I look when I add brandy.

When it comes to cooking with eggnog, we become like Santa Claus in the the kitchen.  You know those cartoons where he wrinkles his nose and a regular space becomes a holiday wonderland?  That’s what eggnog does to ordinary recipes.  It’s like adding a pinch of Christmas to whatever you’re making.  In most cases, all you need to do is replace the milk in a recipe with eggnog.

These are some of my favorite breakfast recipes that use eggnog as a key component.

Have a very Joyous Eggnog Season!

Eggnog Pancakes – This is a recipe is for making pancakes from scratch. They come out very flavorful and surprisingly fluffy considering eggnog’s thicker-than-milk consistency.

Here’s a quick tip: You can take commercial pancake mixes and replace the milk or water in the instructions with eggnog…. Easy Eggnog Pancakes!

Eggnog Smoothie – Blending eggnog with a banana (or other fruit of choice)  is a fun way to turn an indulgent holiday treat into a (mostly) healthy holiday treat.  Add a shot of rum or brandy and it’s even more fun!

Eggnog Coffee – The easiest way to add holiday flavor to your breakfast is to stir a couple Tablespoons of eggnog into your morning coffee.  It turns a cup o’ Joe into a cup o’ Nick.  Saint Nick.  Get it?

Eggnog Muffins – If you want to share joy of Eggnog Season with others, these muffins are perfect little presents.  They’re portable and pretty.  Enjoy one on your way to work.  It’s like a Christmas party in your car.

These are jumbo eggnog muffins I made from the same batter.  I crushed gingerbread cookies to make a crumb topping – an idea Pepperidge Farms called “amazing”.

Here’s 3 more eggnog breakfast recipes I think you’ll like:

Eggnog Waffles

Eggnog French Toast

Pumpkin Spice Eggnog French Toast

For more holiday breakfast recipes, please visit the page on this site called Christmas Breakfast Recipes & Traditions.

Raspberries and chocolate make a great team, especially white chocolate with its creamy, delicate flavor.  These Raspberry and White Chocolate Muffins are incredibly easy to make.  Preparation takes about 10 minutes and baking time is 20 minutes.  Follow along as I take you step-by-step through the recipe.

The ingredients are buttermilk, sugar, flour, raspberries, white chocolate, lemon zest, an egg, butter, vanilla, salt, baking powder and baking soda.

For amounts and a printable recipe, click here.

For best results, use fresh raspberries.  If using frozen berries, add them to the batter while they’re still frozen.  Thawed frozen berries have a tendency to release too much of their juice and make a mess (albeit a delicious mess) of the muffin.  It’s key to use a quality white chocolate like Ghirardelli or Callebaut.  Cheaper white chocolate chips tend to taste artificial and a little like plastic.

Step one is to cream the butter with the sugar until fluffy.  I use an electric beater on the slow setting and gradually increase the speed.  When you get a soft and pillowy texture, add the egg, lemon zest and vanilla and beat just a few more seconds.

Mix the dry ingredients together in a separate bowl and it’s time to combine everything.  Here, it’s important to take your time and use a soft touch.  Over-mixing is the number one enemy of a muffin recipe. Add a third of the flour mixture and a third of the buttermilk to the butter and sugar mixture.  Use a rubber spatula or a wooden spoon and gently fold the flour and liquid into the butter and sugar.  Continue adding the flour mixture and buttermilk in intervals until just combined.  Fold in the raspberries and chocolate using the same gentle touch.

This recipe make 12 regular-sized muffins, so you’ll need to line a standard tin with muffin papers or spray each cup generously with cooking spray.  You can use the same recipe to make jumbo muffins… just increase the cooking time about 6 minutes and check for doneness after 25 minutes.  Also, let jumbo muffins set until completely cooled before serving.  These muffins are soft and tender.  Letting them set firms them up a bit so they won’t break apart in your hand.

Fill the muffin cups 3/4 full.  They’ll rise and stick to one another if the cups are too full.  I like to use an ice cream scoop to fill the cups.  Keep an eye out that you don’t put too many raspberries in any one cup.  The muffins will be particularly tender around the berries and too many berries together could keep a muffin from holding together.

Finally, I sprinkle just a little turbinado over each muffin.  Turbinado has larger granules then white sugar so it forms an attractive crust instead of being absorbed by the batter.

Bake the muffins for 20 minutes in an oven preheated to 375 degrees.  Around 18 minutes, I’ll check for doneness by inserting a toothpick into the largest muffin.  If it comes out clean (no batter sticking to it), the muffins are done.  The muffins pictured here took exactly 20 minutes.

For the short, printable version of this recipe, click here.

For more about muffins, visit my article Muffin Madness 101.  There’s even a Muffin Madness 101 diploma you can print out and frame at the end of the article.

For more than 140 other muffin recipes, visit the Muffin Recipe Page in the site index of MrBreakfast.com.

“One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.” – Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

If they’re done right, they’ll be good for you but they won’t taste like they are.  These bran muffins have raisins, walnuts and an infusion of flavor from vanilla, cinnamon and orange zest.  The sweeteners I use are honey and molasses.  Soaking the bran in hot water and letting the batter rest helps give these muffins a softer, lighter texture.

For the ingredients list and a printable recipe, click here.  This article is a companion piece to that recipe.

Pour boiling water over the wheat bran and stir to moisten.  Soaking the coarse bran softens it up and helps give an overall softer texture to the muffins.

As with other muffin recipes, you want mix your dry ingredients together and then mix your wet ingredients together in a separate bowl.

One of the secrets to a good bran muffin, or almost any muffin for that matter, is gentle mixing.  Use a whisk to mix together your separate wet and dry ingredients.  But when it’s time to bring the mixtures together, use a wooden spoon or rubber spatula and a gentle, slow folding motion.  Over-mixing results in tough, chewy muffins because too much gluten develops as the flour and liquid combine.  Slow and steady wins this race.

For this particular recipe, you mix the moistened wheat bran into the wet ingredients and then you fold the dry ingredients into that mixture.  That’s followed by folding any fruit and nuts into the batter.

When everything is mixed, I cover the batter with plastic wrap and refrigerate it for at least an hour.  I find that it brings all the flavors together and softens the raisins.  You could let the batter set in the refrigerator for up to four days if you want to prep the muffins in advance.

Place paper liners in the muffin cups or spray each cup generously with cooking spray. I like to use an ice cream scoop to dollop the batter.  It helps control the amount of batter per cup and  prevents batter dripping all over the place, as can happen with a large spoon.   Fill each cup 3/4 full.  That’s pretty important.  If you fill them too much, you risk the muffins overflowing out of their cups and fusing with the muffins next to them.

This step isn’t necessary, but I like to sprinkle a few oats over the top of each muffin.  It gives the the muffins a finished look so they feel more like a baked good you might buy in a coffee house.  Plus… ain’t nothin’ wrong with a (very) few more oats in your diet.

Bake the muffins at 375 degrees for 17 to 20 minutes.  To test for doneness, insert a toothpick into the center of a muffin.  If it comes out clean, the muffins are done.

Let them cool for 5 minutes before removing from the muffin tin.

And there you go!  Enjoy that fresh, warm, healthy muffin.

Since I’m trying to avoid the term bran-tastic, let me say this: If this bran muffin was an actor, it’d be a great one like Marlon Bran-do or Kenneth Bran-ough.  If it was an entertainment destination, it’d be Bran-son, Missouri.  Jazz artist? Bran-ford Marsalis.  In short, I think you’ll like them.  Oh heck… they really are bran-tastic!

I love a warm bran muffin with just a little smear of butter.

Here’s the short and sweet printable version of this recipe:

Classic Healthy Bran Muffins

Just for fun:  Here’s my cat, Stretch, staring at a homemade bran muffin.  He’s all like, “Dude, what’s up?  I was using that rock to rest my head.”