birthday blueberry muffins

My sister Kathleen turned one year older last week. Birthdays are a pretty big deal in our family, especially Kathleen's birthday - she's always claimed it's her favorite holiday, and once we celebrated for a week. I offered to use my new pastry super-skills to make her a birthday cake, but was rejected in favor of a Sebastian Joe's Oreo ice cream pie. There were no hard feelings about this, since I'd rather eat Sebastian Joe's ice cream than pretty much anything else on earth, especially on a lovely June day.

I did want to contribute something to Kathleen's birthday though, so I offered to make blueberry muffins for breakfast. We had a giant Costco-size container of blueberries in the fridge (one of the many wonders of being back in suburbia) so I lacked only a recipe. With my cookbooks all still packed away in the cardboard boxes I'd shipped from New York, I turned to my mom's copy of The Joy of Cooking. It's missing the front and back covers and the first few pages, so I can't tell you when it was published, but it certainly looks like it's been well-loved since then.

There are several muffin "base" options in The Joy of Cooking, including bran and sour cream. I decided to stick with the recipe called simply "Muffins", varying as suggested for blueberries and adding some orange zest. They turned out beautifully, the perfect start to a birthday, or any day.

Birthday Blueberry Muffins, adapted from The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit

Ingredients:

2 c. sifted cake flour

3/4 tsp. salt

1/3 c. sugar

2 tsp. baking powder

2 eggs

1/4 c. butter, melted and slightly cooled

3/4 c. milk

1 1/2 c. blueberries, fresh or frozen

1 tsp. grated orange zest

Combine all dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk eggs, melted butter, and milk. Make a well in the dry ingredients, pour in wet ingredients and stir just until combined - it's ok if the batter is still lumpy, and you don't want to overmix. Add zest and blueberries, and pour into prepared muffin tin. Bake until golden brown on top - approximately 18-20 minutes.

(Note: while the original recipe suggests that this makes 2 dozen muffins, I found that it makes 12 standard sized muffins. Muffins must have gotten a lot bigger since this book came out!)