Blueberry Muffins with Lemon Sugar

If you like crunchy, delicious tops on your muffins and a boatload of blueberry flavor, this muffin recipe rocks.  While it has a few preparation steps to handle, like making blueberry "jam" and prepping lemon sugar, it is totally worth it.  Ammmmmazing.

To make the lemon sugar coating on top, you need some lemon zest.  Zesting lemons feels sadistic if you have a tendency to anthropomorphize your fruits and veggies, so try not to think too hard about it.  After that, mix the zest in with the sugar and let it absorb all the delicious flavor.

Zesty.

After that, you make a blueberry "jam".  I put that in quotes because you don't end up adding any pectin for preservation.  To make it, you simply heat up blueberries with some sugar and mash them until they look like this.

I could fingerpaint with this stuff.  Edible art!

The batter for the muffins is fairly standard, but super delicious.  You mix in real blueberries to the batter and scoop it into your muffin tin with your trusty ice cream scoop.  I like to use a silicone muffin "tin" because the muffins just pop right out.  But there is the downside of not getting to pick out adorable muffin papers. =(

After that, you place 1 tsp of blueberry jam into the center of each muffin and swirl it around with a toothpick in a figure 8 pattern.  This adds a lot of awesome blueberry flavor, and makes the muffins a cool shade of purply/blue.

Finally, generously sprinkle on the lemon sugar.  Make sure to lick all the excess off your finger tips and skip wildly about the kitchen.

And after a very short baking time, voila!!

Adjustments / Substitutions

None this time.

Next Time

I would definitely double the recipe, since this only makes 12 muffins.  After my boyfriend and I both ate 3 muffins fresh out of the oven, they didn't stand a chance to make it to sundown.

Source: The Science of Good Cooking (ISBN: 978-1-933615-98-1)