Strawberry Muffins, Yum!!

Muffins have got to be the simplest "quick bread" to ever dress up a bland meal.  It is my comfort food secret to making a relatively boring, lazy meal something special.  Want to serve a dinner soup in the wintertime?  No problem--bake up some muffins to go with it.  Feel like crockpotting a pork roast on Sunday, with sides of rice and a veggie?  Just add muffins to make it extra-special.

The muffin recipe I use comes from my copy of the New Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (2002), carefully working around the cover which should be duct-taped before it falls off completely.  It happens to be the very first recipe in the Bread section and includes a few variations.

I'd made and enjoyed the plain muffins and even cheese muffins several times.  Then one day, I got my hands on a #10 can of freeze-dried strawberries . . . and had one of those "a-ha!" moments.  Strawberry muffins . . . yum . . . 

Knowing the freeze-dried strawberries were a little tart (munch a few and you'll find out), I modeled my strawberry muffin recipe after the cranberry muffin variation, figuring they would benefit by a little more sugar than, say, the blueberry muffin variation.

The experiment was a success!  The muffins were eaten up very quickly, and I was pleased to have learned something I could do besides smoothies with freeze-dried strawberries.

Ingredients:

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup plus 2 Tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 beaten egg
3/4 cup milk
1/4 cup cooking oil
1 cup freeze-dried strawberries, reconstituted

The freeze-dried strawberries need to be reconstituted for this recipe.  For each batch of muffins (I doubled it this time), measure out a cup of freeze-dried strawberries and cover them in warm-hot water.  After about five minutes, they will be ready to be drained and used.

The texture of the reconstituted freeze-dried strawberries is not the same as fresh--much mushier.  While I wouldn't want to just eat a bowl of reconstituted strawberries, they are perfect for using in baked recipes.

The recipe is very simple.  Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl, and the wet ingredients (except the strawberries) in another.  If you use powdered milk, as I do, you can put the dry milk in with the dry ingredients and the requisite water in the wet ingredients, rather than mixing it all up.  (On the other hand, if I use powdered eggs, I seem to have much better results reconstituting the eggs first, rather than separating the dried eggs and water into the wet and dry ingredient bowls.)

Pour the wet ingredients into the center of the bowl with the dry ingredients and mix them.  Because the idea is to mix until everything is moistened, but not until everything is perfectly smooth or whipped, a wooden spoon is the ideal tool to use for this step.

Then fold in the drained strawberries.

Make sure your muffin tins are greased well or lined with cupcake papers.  I prefer greasing the tins, despite the extra effort for clean-up, because we like the crispiness of the finished product.  Using cupcake wrappers leaves the bottom part of the muffin soft instead of slightly crispy.

Fill each cupcake cup about 2/3 of the way full.  It is simple to do this by using a spatula to scrape the batter off a spoon.

Bake the muffins in the center of a 400 degree Fahrenheit oven for about 18-20 minutes.  (20 for me.)  The color should be nicely golden when they are done.

After about 5 minutes out of the oven, loosen the muffins in the muffin tins by sliding around the edge of the muffin with the back edge of a butter knife.  Allow the muffins to fall (gently) into a bowl lined with clean kitchen towels.  Cover the muffins with towels to keep them warm for serving.

Serve warm with butter or jam.  (Although, to be honest, I've never put jam on the table for strawberry muffins.)  Any cooled leftovers (ha! figure the odds) can be put in a plastic zipper bag and heated up later for a few seconds in the microwave when the kids decide they need a snack.

Simple, but delicious.