I have struggled and struggled with this recipe, as the muffins tasted really good but didn’t rise very well. It seemed to me as if the issue must be with the leavening. If you have acidic ingredients such as buttermilk, as my original recipe did, then you’re supposed to use baking soda instead of baking powder, but the recipe called for baking powder. So I’ve tried a number of different leavening amounts and combinations, but I never was quite satisfied with the results. After one especially disastrous experiment I got a Sally’s Baking Addiction post in my inbox (she’s one of only three cooking websites to which I subscribe) that was basically her version of this recipe, although with different spices. Boy, would it have been helpful if she’d made those muffins a week earlier! The version I had just produced
for the Easter breakfast at our church was pretty awful. But no matter. Now I finally had a more workable recipe, which involved using a combination of sour cream or yogurt and regular milk and therefore a combination of baking soda and powder. She also used less sugar than my original recipe did, a change I had already made, so I was pleased to see that I agreed with her. I also now had her technique for getting muffins to rise up in a perfect dome instead of spreading out around the edges of the muffin cup. Some of my muffin recipes don’t have this problem but many do–that if you overfill the cups you get the dreaded spread-out. Not only does it look terrible, the muffins are also hard to remove from the pan without some destruction around the edges. Her idea of an initial blast of high heat and then a lower temp to finish the baking sounded just great. No more slumped muffins! So I followed her version to the letter and liked it okay, but I was a little disappointed with how thin the batter was. Even with the initial oven blast the muffins spread out a bit. And it seemed to me that she was asking for too much baking soda. When I looked at her master muffin recipe I saw that for some reason she had increased the amount of milk for the cranberry ones, 1/3 cup instead of 1/4. I wrote her to ask why but as of this writing I haven’t heard back.
So I did yet another batch (we’ve been eating a lot of cranberry muffins around here), this time decreasing the amount of milk and cutting the amount of baking soda in half. The results are as you see in the pictures. There will be one more batch that should be totally transcendent, as I didn’t have quite enough brown sugar this time and had to use part white, and I didn’t use my usual freshly-ground white whole wheat flour but just regular old unbleached white stuff. (Jim had stayed up really late working on taxes/house stuff, and I didn’t want to wake him up with the jet-engine blast of the grain mill.) So they’re still not quite perfect. And my son insists that the ugly muffins are better, but I think he’s just being obstreperous.
These will now be in heavy rotation on my breakfast list, both for us and for big events. Please take a few minutes to read my rather (ahem) extensive notes at the end of the recipe.
Cranberry Maple Muffins
I've been willing to do a fair amount of tinkering with this recipe because I like the flavor combination so much. These are always very popular at the big breakfasts that I make. Adapted pretty freely from Colorado Collage, a cookbook from the Junior League of Denver, and from Sally's Baking Addiction.
Ingredients
- 3/4 cup brown sugar-- Dark brown, if you have it; otherwise light is fine.
- 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened*
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 cup sour cream or yogurt-- You need the thickness of the ingredient here, so I wouldn't use buttermilk.
- 1/4 cup milk
- 2 tsp. pure maple extract-- Don't use the imitation stuff. Butter to just leave it out if you don't have the real thing.
- 1 3/4 cups flour, either unbleached or whole wheat
- 1/2 tsp. baking soda
- 1 tsp. baking powder
- 1/2 tsp. salt
- 1/2 cup walnuts or pecans, chopped, toasted** if possible
- 1 1/2 cups fresh cranberries,*** halved****
Instructions
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Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Line 12 muffin cups with foil or paper cups (I prefer foil) or spritz the cups with cooking spray.
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Use a hand mixer to beat together the sugar and butter, then add the eggs and beat, and then add the yogurt or sour cream, the milk, and the maple extract.
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Whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt and add to the wet ingredients, mixing on low speed just until incorporated.
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Use a spatula to fold in the cranberries and nuts.
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Bake for 5 minutes at 425, then turn down the heat to 350 without removing the muffins from the oven and bake for 10 minutes more. Test with a toothpick--they may need a minute or two longer.
Recipe Notes
Can be served warm or at room temp.
*If you're like me and tend to forget to take the butter out of the fridge (or worse yet, the freezer) ahead of time, you can microwave it for 2-3 minutes at 10% power. (That's power setting 1.) Be patient and don't use a higher setting, as you don't want melted butter!
**Toasted nuts always taste better (than untoasted ones). I keep walnuts, pecans and almonds in my freezer at all times. Easiest way to toast them is to measure them out onto a baking sheet and put them in the oven when you turn the oven on. They should be about right by the time the oven comes to temp, but you'd better set a timer for 10 minutes just in case you don't notice the beep the oven makes when it's hot. Remember, you're starting out this recipe at 425, so there's not much room for error.
*** I suppose you could use dried cranberries if you were out of fresh ones, but the dried cranberries are sweetened and so your muffins are going to have a different flavor profile. I would chop the dried ones if you use them.
****Although it's kind of fiddly, I do chop each cranberry in half, with the exception of the really tiny ones. In theory you can chop them in the food processor, especially if they're frozen, but I've decided that the results are too uneven. Sally has you put the cranberries in whole, but that's too much cranberry in one bite. (You do keep several bags of cranberries in your freezer at all times, don't you? They don't sell them after the holidays, so if you miss out it's the dried ones or nothing until the next year.)
