I’ll begin by acknowledging what we can all plainly see: these muffins aren’t beautiful. They’re sort of a craggy light brown, a little darker on the tops. They’re covered with blueberries which bleed all over the place and create weird craters when you put too many on in one area. I made them two days in a row just to make sure I couldn’t improve their looks with a little more care. I couldn’t. I did find some other pictures of these online that looked moderately more attractive when the baker arranged the blueberries in a sort of pinwheel pattern, but this person’s patience for arranging berries surpassed mine. So I get it, they’re not going to win any beauty contests. But what they lack in Instagram-ability they make up for in taste, ten times over.
It’s not very often that I make muffins, because they’re so easy to throw together and then I have a dozen little cakes on hand to snack on whenever I see them or remember they exist. It’s just an unnecessarily tempting situation. I can’t explain why, but recently I just had this urge to make blueberry muffins, and so I cracked open the Huckleberry cookbook for the first time and found this recipe. It intrigued me for a few reasons. First, the headnote explained that customers at Huckleberry are so fiercely loyal to these muffins that if the bakery doesn’t stock them on a given day, people freak out. Second, they called for a cup of toasted wheat germ, and I happened to have a mostly full jar of it in the pantry from when I made this incredible cake.
I also felt a little less guilty making these because they don’t have the genetic make-up of a white cake with blueberries on top. The sweetener in the batter is equal parts brown sugar (I used dark), maple syrup and honey. Now, I’m often skeptical of baked goods that contain non-sugar sweetener because I feel like they never taste as good, but it helped to justify my mid-afternoon muffin baking bonanza, so I decided to go for it.
Speaking with the authority of someone who now has about 20 of these muffins tucked into the various crevices of her extremely small and full freezer, they are really excellent. Unusually excellent, even. They have a maple flavor (not too strong) that complements the blueberries well, and a dense crumb from the wheat germ. And their tops are crunchy and caramelized, which is always the best part of a muffin. So if you’re a guilty muffin eater like I am, these are really the perfect compromise for you- you just have to look past their average appearance!
A few notes:
1) If you have the cookbook, you'll notice I've left off the metric measurements. I usually weigh when baking but found that the wheat germ weight was very off so I'd recommend using the cups and spoons.
2) These are best eaten the day they're made but they'll keep pretty well in the freezer if you aren't up to eating 14 muffins in a single day.
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled
- 1/4 cup brown sugar, plus more for sprinkling
- 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 egg
- 1/4 cup maple syrup
- 1/4 cup honey
- 6 tablespoons canola oil
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 cup wheat germ, toasted
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 cup whole plain yogurt
- 2 cups fresh blueberries
- Granulated sugar for sprinkling
Instructions
- Evenly space two racks in your oven and preheat to 350°F. Line two 12-cup muffin pans with 14 paper liners, spacing them evenly between the two pans.
- Pour the butter into a large bowl. Add the brown sugar and salt and whisk together by hand. Whisk in the egg, followed by the maple syrup, honey and canola oil. Add the flour, wheat germ, baking soda and yogurt, mixing cautiously until just incorporated.
- Fill the muffin cups with batter almost all the way to the top, then top with the blueberries and sprinkle with a little brown sugar and granulated sugar.
- Bake for about 20 minutes until the muffins are browned and spring back when touched.
Notes
From Huckleberry
