Blueberry 'Nuffins

Picking up Teagan from daycare yesterday, she proudly announced to her class that we would be making "nuffins" which translates into muffins. Fortunately, I had planned for this but you probably have everything you need for these muffins in your pantry. We used a recipe which I adapted from one I found on Allrecipes.com which is one of my favorite sites to find random things to make. To find the original recipe click here.
    We tripled the original recipe and when I usually make these I use my massive muffin pan, but since we were making these for little kids we went with the normal cupcake size and I ended up with 2 dozen muffins.  These muffins are amazingly simple and kick any store bought muffin's top off.

Muffin Mix

4 1/2 cups Flour
2 1/4 cups Sugar
1 1/2 tsp Salt
2 tbsp Baking Powder
1 cup Butter, melted 
3 Eggs
1 cup Milk
1 tbsp vanilla

Mix together your dry ingredients.  In a different bowl combine butter, eggs, milk and vanilla and mix.  Combine wet and dry ingredients and mix till well incorporated.  At this point you can add whatever you want to the mix, we went with blueberries, but I have also made this recipe with bananas and nuts, dried cranberries and chocolate chips.  Really the muffin possibilities are endless.  We went with the blueberries, and please, please, please use fresh blueberries. It makes a huge difference, your muffins are going to be immeasurably more delicious. 

2 pints Fresh Blueberries

Add in the blueberries and mix just enough to incorporate through the batter.  Your blueberries will float more to the top, so try to make sure you get them all the way through.

Line muffin pan with your muffin papers and fill each one to the top. I feel like the best tool to use for this is an ice cream scoop.  Grease the top of the pan between muffins.  Now its time for the Sugar Crumb topping, yummmmmmm

I make this in advance and keep in in a bag in the fridge, you can put this on just about any baked good to make it more magically delicious. It's super simple and easy, and really take the muffin top to another level.

1 cup Flour
1 1/2 cup Sugar
3/4 cup Butter, softened and cubed
1 tbsp cinnanmon

Use a fork to blend ingredients.  Place your thumb just below the prongs on the fork and press down over the cubes of butter. Once it's mixed  you'll have a sparkling mixture of muffin topping heaven. 
Sprinkle generously over muffins, I totally cover the top of the muffin.  This will create a little crunch over the whole muffin top.

Bake at 400 degrees for 25 minutes.  Near the end of the cooking time I check every 3 minutes or so until they have reached the perfect golden brown.  Let the muffins cool until you can handle them to remove them from the pan, then let to fully cool on a rack and ENJOY! 

Post Exam Pancakes and Inspiration

     I'm gonna be honest, I can make a lot of things, but good pancakes are not one of them, good thing I don't have to.  After yet another exam crammed in at the end of the semester I needed some syrupy sustenance and I headed to probably one of my favorite places for pancakes, well, actually, hot cakes, the Bel Loc Diner.If there is a difference between pancakes and hotcakes I don't know what it is and I would love for someone to enlighten me, but honestly, I don't care what they're called when they taste this good.  On the corner of Loch Raven and Joppa I found the breakfast oasis which would help me stop thinking about all the little things that I forgot about as soon as that exam started. 
     For those of you who haven't been there the Bel Loc is a simple diner with a lot of charm. Well maintained booths line the walls and on a day like today it's never too crowded.  The bar is covered with desserts and black and white tiles trim the ceiling adding to the comfy casual retro motif. We settled into our booth and I didn't even need to look at the menu. I wanted a little stack of heaven, which isn't a little stack at all. A pile of 3 huge hotcakes arrived just minutes after I had ordered, accompanied for me by a side of scrapple, my dining companion went with the ham.  A stack of syrup packets were delivered to the table with our breakfast, and while it looks like a lot, but these sponges of heaven soaked up that syrup creating a cosmic combination of sugar, flour, butter, amazingness.  This is the part where I forget about the fact that I wasn't sure if I put B or C for #27, I don't even care.  I couldn't even get through half the plate, although I happily devoured my perfectly cooked thickly sliced side of scrapple which would have made my Grandmother proud.
     Sitting there allowing myself to digest Danielle and I talked about everything from pancakes to pho (future blog entry alert) to wedding dresses to that awful exam. I don't know how long we sat with our mountains of remaining hotcakes and coffee, but somehow my hotcake induced euphoria led me to the idea of a food blog.  I know there are lot of food blogs out there but I hope you can join me on my GI (gastrointestinal) adventures. I'll lead you down a winding trail of my favorite places, favorite recipes, and some of my own personal cooking  triumphs and disasters, which everyone has but not everyone admits to. 
      Fully satiated and inspired we headed out with to-go boxes in hand to our next destination. I don't think the left over hotcakes are going to last very long, I'm getting hungry writing this and I think it's time for a snack.