One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

I only try to post good things on this blog, but every once in a while something takes more than one try. Pictured above is an awesome blueberry buckle I made this morning. But let's rewind about one week, when I tried to make some muffins.

I used a blueberry muffin recipe form Deanna House. They were seriously gross. Maybe it was because I subbed raspberries, or maybe because they were frozen. Maybe it was because I wrote the blog post as the muffins were baking I dunno. Seriously! And using raspberries was really the only substitution I made but I guess it was a crucial one. Here is my unpublished post, so my creativity isn't all for naught.

Way back sometime last year, I resolved to make muffins every Sunday instead of buying a pastry or bagel every morning. You see how that worked out. Regardless, I haven't had a good muffin in a while and had some time on my hands this evening, so I whipped up some Raspberry muffins inspired by, you guessed it, the Deanna House book. Michigan is apparently famous for its blueberries. I don't think many berries are in season right now, which is why I had to settle for frozen raspberries at the grocery store last week. I've never used frozen fruit before. It kinda freaks me out. First of all, it made the batter really weird colored. Frozen things don't nicely fold into batter. The melting water just disperses and taints the whole bowl. So the muffin batter was a cool purple color, but fully baked, the muffins themselves looked weird. Boo. But as for the taste...


And that's where I left off. In hindsight, maybe I should have taken a hint from the crazy colored batter and weird looking muffins. Ugh, Anyway, I wanted to give try again, this time with fresh blueberries. But I also still had my doubts about the recipe's merit, so I tried a similar recipe from the book, one recommended by my future mom-in-law. And it is fabulous. Next time, I'm going to pour this batter into the muffin cups and call it a day. I did a couple things different from Deanna House (a little more sugar in the batter and more flour in the topping) and I'm sharing the recipe here. Go ahead and file this under things I really, really recommend.


For the batter, you'll need:
2 cups of flour
1 cup of sugar (Deanna House says 3/4, but I wanted to make sure they were sweet enough after my bland raspberry muffin debaucle)
2 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder
3/4 teaspoon of salt
1/4 cup of vegetable oil
3/4 cup of milk
1 egg
2 cups of blueberries

For the topping, you'll need:
1/4 cup of really soft butter
1/3 cup of flour
1/2 cup of sugar
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
(and maybe some extra flour and cinnamon to sprinkle as needed)

• Preheat oven to 375
• Mix flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt
• In a measuring cup, mix milk, vegetable oil, and egg. Whisk until the egg dissolves into the mixture.
• Pour into flour mixture and stir until you can't see anymore flour.
• Fold blueberries in, careful not to smush them.
• Pour into a 9x9 pan (I only had 8x8 - just takes a little longer to bake)
• Combine butter, flour, sugar, and cinnamon.
• Crumble over batter. Mine really stuck together so I had to take the stuff in my hand and literally crumble it over the pan.
• If it looks a little doughy to you, sprinkle some flour and a bit of cinnamon over everything to ensure you get a really nice crust.
• Bake for 30 minutes (mine took about 40+ since I used an 8x8 pan)
• Enjoy!