Blueberry Muffins

Every Thursday night, Steve and I participate in a Couples’ Bible Study, and each week we are assigned a food dish to bring for dinner.  I love it, because I never have to try to brainstorm about what to make for dinner on Thursday nights.  Each couple brings a dish, and we get to eat a ton of scrumptious food!

Tonight was “Breakfast Night” so I volunteered to make home made muffins.  I love breakfast for dinner, don’t you?  I made two different types of muffins: Blueberry and Strawberry.  The Blueberry were definitely the favorite, which is why I’m posting the recipe for them first, but I will post the Strawberry Muffin recipe later!

Note: I made this recipe incorrectly, but they still turned out great, so I’m just going to post it the way I made it.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• 4 oz cream cheese, softened
• 1/4 cup & 1/3 cup white sugar
• 1/2 tsp lemon zest
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 pint blueberries

Preheat the oven to 350°, then start by combining cream cheese and 1/4 cup sugar in a large mixing bowl.

Add the lemon zest.  I zested the lemon straight over the bowl and just kind of eyeballed the amount.

The key to zesting a lemon (or any citrus fruit for that matter), is to only zest the very outer layer of the peel.  You want the colored part, not the white part which is very bitter.  So make sure when you’re zesting, you don’t go too deep.

Add the vanilla extract.

Then add one of the eggs and mix until thoroughly combined.  This is the part I messed up on.  The original recipe told me to set this aside and prepare the dry ingredients.  What I didn’t know was that I was to keep it to the side and not combine it with the dry ingredients, which were going to be combined with another set of wet ingredients.  Anyway, I mixed everything together and it turned out just great, so you can either do it the way I did it, or you can keep this wet mixture to the side, and I’ll tell you when to add it later.

Mix flour, 1/3 cup white sugar, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.  Make sure it is completely combined and blended together.

Here’s where I messed up.  I added the rest of the wet ingredients to the wet ingredients from before, when I should have mixed them separately, but you can do whatever you want.

I added the other egg, the milk….

And the vegetable oil.  And mixed it so it was completely combined.

Then I turned my mixer on low and gradually added the dry ingredients to the bowl.

Once the wet and dry ingredients were completely combined, I added the blueberries.  I gave them a rough chop first so that some were cut in half and others left whole.

If you notice the small chunks of cream cheese around the side of the bowl, that’s what happens when you don’t let your cream cheese come to room temperature before you try to mix it.  So make sure you don’t add cream cheese straight from your refrigerator!

Add cupcake liners to your baking pan and pour the batter into the cups, stopping when they’re about 3/4 full.

Now, if you decided to try the recipe the way it was initially designed here’s how you’d do this.  You would fill the cupcake liners half full with batter.  Then you would spoon 1 teaspoon of that first wet mixture that you set aside right on top of the batter that you poured into the liners.  Finally, you would go back and add more batter until the cups were 3/4 full.  I’m not sure why the recipe was written this way, but it must be for a purpose, so if you’d like to try it that way, be my guest!  Otherwise, you can just fill the cups 3/4 full with the batter where you “mistakenly” combined all the ingredients together.

Hope that wasn’t too confusing.

Bake the muffins at 350° for 30 minutes.  Then let them cool in the pan for a few minutes before transferring them to a wire rack to cool the rest of the way.

Go ahead and take a bite of one before it is completely cooled.  It’s worth it!  A muffin straight out of the oven….yum!

Hope you enjoy these blueberry muffins!  Everyone seemed to like them at the Bible Study!