Bananoramaberry Smoothie

Greetings, friends! It definitely feels like summer here in Boston, and you know what summer makes me think of? Fun, cool drinks like smoothies! I made this delicious, healthy smoothie last week, and I'm not going to lie....I drank it so quickly you'd barely know I ever made it! Oops. It was just so good that I couldn't help it. :)

This made about 12 ounces or so for me, so it could easily be shared between two people too. I was selfish though and kept it for myself!

Ingredients:

-1/2 cup frozen banana (equals approx. one medium banana)

-1/2 cup frozen blueberries

-one 6 oz. container cherry flavored yogurt

-1 cup almond milk

Place all ingredients in your blender and blend away! You can certainly use any kind of yogurt you'd like. I happened to choose cherry, and it lent some great flavor to the smoothie. It also lent some of the pretty "purply" color, I think, although that's probably also due to the blueberries. You could also use regular or soy milk too, depending on your preference.

The smoothie coordinates well with my petunias!

Like my Dogfish Head beer glass? :)

Yum yum yum! Love it. I make different flavored smoothies all the time. Hopefully I will share more of them with you in the future! What are some of your favorite smoothie combinations or flavors? Do share!! :)

The Barefoot Contessa's Addictive Blueberry Muffins

WARNING! You are about to read a blog post about some of the best tasting blueberry muffins out there!!

Okay, you've been warned.

Now you can read on. :)

I made these muffins last week for our weekly lab meeting at work. I think I've mentioned this meeting before... We all take turns each week bringing in breakfast, and typically, people bring in bagels (which are always a fun treat!). But I always like to take my turn as an opportunity to bake something yummy to share! This time around for lab meeting, I made these blueberry muffins and a beer cheese bread (blog post is planned soon about that one too!).

Blueberries!!!!

I used a recipe from Ina Garten, the Food Network's Barefoot Contessa. I have made a few of her recipes now, and I have to say, she hasn't let me down yet! Her recipes have all been delicious, and this one for blueberry muffins is no exception! You can check out her recipe for them here. She calls them "Blueberry Coffee Cake Muffins." The only thing I did differently was add yogurt in place of the sour cream since I did not have sour cream on hand. You can read about other possible sour cream substitutes here if you'd like. I tend to prefer the taste of yogurt to sour cream anyway, so I almost always use yogurt when I bake instead of sour cream! I did use real butter, as the recipe calls for; that may have made them exceptionally yummy too... Sometimes I opt for margarine in lieu of butter, but I went for the real thing this time! Oh right, and I also added a bit of fresh lemon juice - maybe 1 or 2 tablespoons or so? The original recipe doesn't call for lemon juice.

Mmmmm, here's the batter. 

And here is a platter of the tasty muffins, ready for my coworkers to consume!

And below are some pictures of a muffin I ate... Or, was it hoops and yoyo who ate it?!? I may have given them a nibble or two. ;-)

Super sad - it's all gone! :-(

I can't quite put my finger on what it was that made these muffins so delicious... All I know is that they were very moist and quite flavorful. To be honest, I was actually going to add a streusel topping of sorts too, but I got lazy and didn't! And as it turns out, these muffins did not need a streusel topping at all! They were delicious on their own.

Oh, also of note, this recipe makes a lot of muffins! The recipe says it makes 16 muffins...but for me, this recipe made 12 regular-sized muffins, 24 mini ones, AND 1 mini loaf! That's a lot of blueberry goodness. :-D

Now it's your turn to go make some muffins bursting with flavor! I bet you can't eat just one. ;-) See you next time!

Blueberry Muffins with Streusel Topping

Hi friends! It's been a while since I posted about our lobstah dinner...I've been meaning to post sooner, but alas, life gets in the way! This post will be a relatively short one for me, but it's a deeeelicious one, I promise you. This past weekend I was home in upstate NY, and Mom gave me the reigns on Sunday morning to make something with the blueberries she had (she had put some fresh ones from last summer in the freezer to keep - and they still tasted fresh and yummy several months later!). I considered making a blueberry coffee cake, but we were all hungry and I didn't want to wait as long as it would take for a coffee cake to bake! So, I went with the tried and true blueberry muffin, which everyone loves. :)

I ended up using a previous recipe I had posted, so that made life quite easy as well. And it's making this blog post simple too - no need to repeat the recipe! I'll just provide you with a link to the muffin recipe here (it was my "berry delicious muffins" recipe). This time instead of using a berry medley, I just used blueberries; hence, the name of this post, "blueberry muffins with streusel topping." I am so original!

You can see the nice, plump blueberries here in the batter!

By the way, start to finish (including baking time), this recipe does not take much more than a half hour. Piece of cake...er, muffin! I think I've used that joke before. Sorry. ;-)

This time around, the recipe made 12 regular sized muffins plus one bigger muffin baked in a silicone muffin cup, as you can see pictured here. No need to grease it even!

I know - why don't you make your own muffins this coming weekend? I think that's a grand idea! Oh, and the next post I have planned is another breakfast item....but as to what it is exactly, I won't tell you yet. Ooooh, the suspense! Talk to you again soon, friends.

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!