Strawberry-Almond Muffins

I’ve been worried about my muffin recipe for months.

Strawberry Almond Muffins Recipe

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The recipe

Yield: 12 muffins

Time: 1 ½ hours

Ingredients

Muffins:

1 ¼ c (160 g) flour

½ c (110 g) sugar

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

1 c (200 g) roughly chopped strawberries

4 Tbsp salted butter

1 ½ tsp almond extract

½ tsp vanilla extract

½ c (130 g) sour cream

2 eggs

Crumbs:

¾ c (94 g) flour

¼ c (55 g) sugar

¼ c (55 g) brown sugar

2 Tbsp malt powder

4 tbsp salted butter

Instructions

Muffins

1. Preheat your oven to 375°F and put 12 paper liners in a cupcake pan. (If you like living on the edge, skip the paper liners and look at the note below.)

2. Stir together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl.

3. Add the strawberries to the dry ingredients and toss them to coat. Set aside.

4. Melt the salted butter in the microwave (about 20 seconds). Add the extracts to the butter and whisk to combine.

5. Whisk the sour cream into the butter mixture.

6. Whisk the eggs into the butter mixture.

7. Pour the liquid into the dry ingredients and stir until almost combined. DO NOT OVER-MIX these muffins. There should still be a few dry bits in the batter. This is fine. (See the note and the story for more details.)

8. Scoop the batter into the cupcake pan, filling each liner ¾ full.

Crumbs

9. Stir together the flour, sugars, and malt powder in a medium bowl.

10. Melt the butter in the microwave (about 20 seconds).

11. Add the butter to the flour mixture and stir until combined.

12. Sprinkle the crumbs on top of the muffins.

13. Bake for 17–23 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the middle of a muffin comes out either with a few cooked crumbs clinging to it or clean.

14. (For muffins without liners, see the note below). For muffins with liners, let them cool in the pans for 10 minutes, then run a knife around the top edge and gently lift them out. Eat warm or cool.

15. The muffins will keep in an airtight container at room temperature for a few days, but after the first day they’ll lose their crunchy tops.

Notes and tips

If you really want to, you can skip the paper liners. Just be warned: the muffins are very tender and could fall apart on you when you try to get them out of the pan. If you still want to go through with it, grease your pans well with butter or shortening before spooning in the batter. When the muffins come out of the oven, don’t remove them from the pans until they’ve cooled significantly (about 30 minutes). Run a knife around the top and sides of each muffin to loosen it, then gently try to lift it from the pan. If it starts falling apart, wait 5 minutes and try again.

Use fresh, in-season strawberries for this recipe. The key to good flavor here is good berries. Frozen fruit would normally be an adequate substitute, but it didn’t work for me when I tried. The berries were watery and the muffins were soggy.

You really really really don’t want to over-mix the muffin batter. It feels so very wrong not to mix thoroughly, but I promise they’ll be fine. The wet and dry pockets in the batter will magically bake up evenly in the oven, I promise!

I use a plastic knife to loosen the muffin tops so I don’t scratch my nice pan.

To improve day-old muffins, my dad has the best trick: cut the muffin in half, butter each half, and fry them, butter side down, in a pan over medium heat until browned and warmed through. They might be better fried than fresh!

1. Chopped berries; 2. Dry ingredients ready; 3. Note the UNEVEN batter; 4. Full pans; 5. Crumb-topped; 6. Fresh out of the oven; 7. Evenly-distributed berries

The story

I made my plum muffins for a book club this winter, and they didn’t come out moist and fluffy like I remembered from when I developed the recipe. They were bready and dry. I only picked at the muffin I served myself, and, tellingly, no one wanted to take the extras home.

I did what I usually do when I’ve made a mistake on the blog: I panicked. If I couldn’t bake my own recipe, it was bad. And if dry muffins were people’s introduction to my blog, they’d never come back and try my delicious cakes.

I hoped by ignoring muffingate for long enough, I’d forget it. But my perfectionist brain kept whispering to me: “You say bad recipes don’t deserve to exist, and yet you aren’t holding yourself to your own standards. How can you call yourself a cake snob if you tolerate dry muffins?” It was right. I couldn’t.

I developed this new muffin recipe in an attempt to figure out the problem and fix the old one. My first few attempts were just like the book club ones: dry and tough.

I did everything I could think of to make a baked good more tender and moist: increased the liquid, added more fat, and upped the sugar, all to no avail. I still had bready muffins, and they were worse than the first batch—the strawberries had sunk.

I did more research and at last stumbled upon a website that explained what over-mixing muffin batter meant. Stirring until everything was evenly combined meant you’d gone too far—You should still have patchy bits of flour and liquid in your batter. Oh. Oh, so that was the problem. It made sense. Generally, the more you agitate a batter, the more gluten you develop, and the more gluten you develop, the tougher a baked good is. Mystery solved. But WHY did no other recipe SPECIFY HOW LONG TO STIR FOR?

I baked the muffins again, stirring less, just to make sure I’d solved the problem. The muffins were perfectly moist, slices of strawberry studded evenly throughout. It was a resounding success.

Armed with my new knowledge, I looked up the plum muffin recipe to set right my wrong, and I saw, written right there in the instructions, “stir until mostly combined (there should be some wet and some dry spots in the mixture).” I put my head in my hands and simultaneously cried and laughed.

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