Blueberry muffins (p. 635) and Cinnamon sugar (p. 1019)

Muffins! Sometimes, I'm just in the mood for muffins. I'll admit that I tend to use mixes (they sure are cheap) when I make muffins but I decided to try TJOC's recipe.

A component of this recipe is Cinnamon sugar (p. 1019). Cinnamon sugar is one of those recipes that you read and think "Really? Does anyone REALLY need a recipe for this??" You combine sugar and cinnamon and that's it. The entire recipe.

I think I'm the only person in American that doesn't particularly like cinnamon. I never liked that cinnamon/sugar toast that everyone goes so crazy for. I only made a half-recipe of this and still have a big pile of it in a plastic bag, left-over. Any ideas for what to do with it?



On to the muffins--Blueberry muffins (p. 635).

The first step is to mix flour, baking powder, and salt. Easy enough start!




Then mix the wet ingredients. TJOC recommends that the muffins are made with the full amount of butter and milk if you aren't going to eat them all in one sitting (I sure hoped they were going to last more than one meal). Apparently the extra fat helps keep them from staling.





Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix--but not too much. Apparently, overmixing can run muffins and make them tough.




I thought the batter (could this even be called batter?) looked very dry and strange but what do I know? I ladled it out into the muffin pans. At this point I looked around the kitchen...

And saw a cup of milk sitting on the counter. I totally forgot the milk. No wonder the batter looked so bizarre.

At this point I had no idea what to do. Are they ruined? Should I throw them out? I didn't have any more blueberries or milk (I had used half milk and half cream--so I guess I used half and half!) so I couldn't start over. I figured that it would be interesting to see if they still turned out, so I dumped all of the muffins out of their liners back into the bowl and added the milk. I figured that the overmixing/toughness problem is due to gluten formation because of th milk and flour, so without the milk, it shouldn't have been a problem (that may or may not be accurate but that was my thought process).

It seemed to mix all right.





I ladled the batter into the muffin liners (for the second time). The batter seemed much more like I expect it to look.



The cinnamon sugar was sprinkled on the top.



(I know there is nothing attractive about my pre-cooked muffins--I will never have a gorgeous Flikr stream that some bloggers seem to have)

They only took about 17 minutes to cook and they were beautiful! They were big and puffy and looked like bakery muffins!





I was so happy with the muffins! They are sweet but not too sweet (and I made them with all white sugar rather than brown) and the blueberry' were juicy and tasty. They even heated up well (and stayed moist!). I loved them. These are definitely going to be made again. I can't recommend them enough and my mistake didn't matter! I don't think they were much harder than the mix so maybe I'll make them from scratch for now on....