Berry Delicious Muffins

I've made three types of muffins in the past week. For Memorial Day, I made star shaped raspberry muffins from my favorite Linda Fisher Muffin Lady cookbook, pictured above. I decided the recipe needed a little something so I added chocolate syrup to some of it for the variation pictured above. Then yesterday I made blueberry, also from the book.

And what's up with my counter, you ask? After my husband installed the new cabinets the counters did not fit, and he had to patch them with an old counter we had in the attic for safety until we get a new one.

Here's my variation on her Raspberry Muffins:
2 cups flour

1 cup sugar

1 tablespoon baking powder

pinch salt

2 eggs

1/4 cup oil

4 tablespoons melted margarine

3/4 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

6 oz. fresh raspberries or unsweetened frozen (frozen supposedly hold together better, but I never care about details like that...)

1/4 cup Hershey's chocolate syrup. Yes, like what you put on lowfat frozen yogurt with any leftover raspberries...

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Sift together the dry ingredients. Blend in the eggs, oil, butter, milk and vanilla. (Now do that slowly - I ended up with splashed up melted butter on my glasses, which made measuring the rest tricky.) Fold in the berries. If a preschooler helps you with this, you may have better that is somewhat red. Linda's recipe says 12 normal sized muffins. I got about 18 out of this one, and wait until you see my output on the blueberry ones...

I took about 1/2 of the batter and stirred in the chocolate syrup.

Bake for 35 minutes.

The chocolate ones turned out more moist but both sets were good.

Blueberry City

4 rounded cups flour (You would think this would clue me in about output, right? And I didn't even notice the 'rounded' part.)

2 cups sugar

2 tablespoons baking powder (!)

1/2 teaspoon salt

4 eggs (again - big recipe)

1/2 cup oil

1 stick melted margarine

1 1/2 cups skim milk

2 teaspoons vanilla

1 pint fresh blueberries (I stuck them in the freezer while the oven preheated.)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Sift together all the dry ingredients. Add the eggs, oil, butter, milk and vanilla. This batter is pretty tough to stir. Fold in the blueberries, and good luck with that. Using an ice cream scoop, fill 12 muffin cups. OK - here's where we parted ways. I filled one 12 muffin try. Then another. Then a 6-tray. Then most of a mini-muffin tray. It reminded me of a Homer Price book I read as a child where a doughnut machine could not stop working. I still have fantasies about that, by the way.

Bake for 30 - 40 minutes. Then hurry around trying to find containers for all the muffins. I packed up some for my parents and they still froze half. I have a bunch in my freezer, and still about 20 wrapped on my counter.

I finished Mary Janice Davidson's Undead and Uneasy. This was terrific. I was losing interest in this humorous vampire series, thinking she was doing too many books a year, but this brought it all back together. I'm now reading Little Lady, Big Apple, by Hester Browne. It's a sequel about an English woman who starts an agency to help people with all sorts of life problems. It's hilarious.

Anyone want a muffin?