The Floured Apron

This is my first week doing Tuesdays with Dorie, and I’m already breaking the rules. You see, everyone else is posting about Brown Sugar-Apple Cheesecake. I’m posting about muffins. More specifically, the Orange Berry Muffins that everyone else made on January 29th. My first reason for this is that my copy of Baking is still hanging out with the kind people at Amazon, because paying for shipping goes against everything I believe in. But my second (and more honest, since I could go pick up the book from my town library) reason is my aforementioned cheesecake hatred. If I hadn’t just made cheesecake last week, I would have done it. But it was just a few days ago that I threw out the leftover cheesecake bars, and I couldn’t bring myself to make my least favorite dessert again so soon. So you’ll have to forgive me, but I’m doing Tuesdays with Dorie retro-style this week.

Unfortunately, these muffins didn’t work out as well as I would have hoped. I have a terrible tendency to ignore my intuition. I knew that these muffins were going to burn in a 400 degree oven. I knew that they would need to come out long before 22 to 25 minutes. But I had read all the TWD entries about them and no one mentioned that. So I guess I assumed that these were magic Dorie muffins and perhaps they were heat-retardent. Uhhh…not so much. They started smelling done at 15 minutes, but I obstinately refused to let them out for several more minutes. I didn’t believe the cooking time was really that far off! So I ended up with slightly burned muffins.

But you know what? These were my favorite slightly burned muffins ever. The orange flavor was just strong enough and they were full of blueberries. These are perfect breakfast muffins because they aren’t very sweet at all. The bottoms were quite dark and the tops were much crunchier than I like, but I can forgive. I’ll probably even make these muffins again during the summer when I can use fresh blueberries. But in the future I’ll turn my oven down to a more reasonable 350.

Orange Berry Muffins

Dorie Greenspan “Baking: From My Home to Yours” p. 3

You might be with me on the temperature thing. Or you might want to try it Dorie’s way, because it seems like the other TWD bakers got perfectly lovely, unburned results. I’ve put the recipe up as Dorie wrote it.

Ingredients

Preparation

Getting Ready:

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Butter or spray the 12 molds in a regular-size muffin pan or fit the molds with paper muffin cups. Alternatively, use a silicone muffin pan, which needs neither greasing nor paper cups. Place the muffin pan on a baking sheet.
Pour the orange juice into a large glass measuring cup or a bowl and pour in enough buttermilk to make 1 cup. Whisk in the eggs, honey and melted butter.

In a large bowl, rub the sugar and orange zest together with your fingertips until the sugar is moist and the fragrance of orange strong. Whisk in the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Pour the liquid ingredients over the dry ingredients and, with the whisk or a rubber spatula, gently but quickly stir to blend. Don’t worry about being thorough – the batter will be lumpy and bubbly, and that’s just the way it should be. Stir in the blueberries. Divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups.

Bake for 22 to 25 minutes. If you want to top the muffins with decorating sugar, sprinkle on the sugar after the muffins have baked for 10 minutes. When fully baked, the tops of the muffins will be golden and springy to the touch and a thin knife inserted into the center of the muffins will come out clean. Transfer the pan to a rack and cool for 5 minutes before carefully removing each muffin from its mold.