Berry Delicious Muffins!

"Bursting with berry goodness" - this is how Melissa and Megan described these muffins. :)

My brother and sister were in town this weekend, and this morning we woke up to several inches of snow and some wintry cold weather... So, I thought to myself, I should bake us all something yummy for breakfast! Wintry weather always makes me want to bake. I decided to make some mixed berry muffins since I had all the ingredients on hand. It's a recipe I've made before from my Betty Crocker Baking for Today cookbook. This cookbook has some great, classic recipes from good ol' Betty. Anyway, below are the ingredients I used this morning. The original recipe does not call for cinnamon, but I added some. I don't think you can ever really go wrong with adding cinnamon! :)

For the muffins:

-3/4 cup milk (I used skim)

-1/4 cup vegetable oil

-1 egg

-2 cups all-purpose flour

-1/2 cup sugar

-2 tsp. baking powder

-1/2 tsp. salt

-1 tsp. cinnamon

-1 and 1/2 cups mixed frozen berries (the recipe actually calls for 1 cup fresh, canned (drained), or frozen blueberries)

For the streusel topping:

-1/4 cup flour

-1/4 cup packed brown sugar

-1/4 tsp. cinnamon

-2 tbsp. butter or margarine

Heat oven to 400. Grease 12 muffin cups or line with paper baking cups. In large bowl, beat milk, oil, and egg with a fork or whisk. Stir in flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt all at once until the flour is moistened. The batter will be a bit lumpy. Fold in the berries, and divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups.

For the streusel topping, mix the first three ingredients and then cut in the butter until the mixture is crumbly. Sprinkle each muffin with about 1 tablespoon of the streusel topping.

Bake 20 to 22 minutes or until golden brown. Remove muffins from pan and let cool in wire rack. Serve warm if desired (I would recommend this!).

Here is a picture of the batter before I distributed it among the muffin cups... The batter made 14 muffins today. Look at those big, yummy berries!

And here you can see that I used Christmas paper muffin cups. It's a bit past Christmas, but I have so many that I thought I'd use up some more of them!

Okay, so now I have a confession to make. Do you notice in the picture above that the muffins do not have streusel topping on them? Well, I somehow got distracted this morning and neglected to put the topping on the muffins before I put them in the oven. Oopsie!! Silly me. I did make the streusel topping though, and here is a picture of it (before fully cutting the butter into the mixture).

So I bet you're wondering what I did, aren't you? Haha. Well, Melissa suggested that I melt some butter, dip the top of each muffin in the melted butter, and then sprinkle with the streusel topping. And that's pretty much what I did. I actually scooped out the pieces of butter from the prepared streusel mixture first, so after dipping the top of each muffin in some melted butter, I was only sprinkling a combination of flour, brown sugar, and cinnamon on each muffin. They turned out just fine! So, should you yourself forget to add a streusel topping to an item before baking, there are methods for improvising. :)

Oh, and one last point of note for this post... Notice that pretty picture at the very top of the half muffin with the pink background? I often have a hard time taking pictures of some of my baked goodies because I don't have the best backgrounds really...or the time to fool around that much with the photography! I mean, I'd love for my pictures to look like those in the magazines and cookbooks, but I'm not a professional.... ;-) Today, though, Megan offered to hold up a pink towel behind the muffin as I photographed it...and voila! This picture had a nicer background than most of my other pictures. Neato! Good thing I had Melissa and Megan around today to give me some great ideas!