Kristi’s Blueberry Oatmeal Muffins

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I’ve been playing around with Kristi Bernardo’s Blueberry with Some Oatmeal Muffins from her blog The Wicked Noodle. They are blueberry muffins of the best kind, chock full of blueberries and reasonably healthy too. They aren’t sweet ‘bakery muffins,’ as Kristi herself notes. This batch is as close to Kristi’s original recipe as I came:

blueberry oatmeal muffins

I used white whole wheat flour instead of regular whole wheat flour and kefir for the very similar buttermilk (I suspect yogurt would also do).  Flavorful, but slightly less sweet coconut palm sugar stood in for brown sugar, and I chose macadamia nut oil with its amazing 1:1 omega 3 to omega 6 ratio for the vegetable oil. For one batch I added a lightly mashed banana, which made them a bit sweeter. I encourage you to start with Kristi’s recipe and play around in the kitchen yourself!

The challenge with a baked good that’s so packed full of fruit or another wet ingredient is getting it baked all the way through without burning the top. I tried a few batches with variations, and each time I found that I needed to keep the muffins in the oven longer than Kristi had, up to half an hour, even when I didn’t compound the fruit situation by adding a banana. On a couple of batches I put foil over the top for part of the cooking time to prevent excessive browning.

Neither my oven nor my baking tins are terribly standard, so your baking time may vary. I use my grandmother’s cast iron muffin tins that date from early in the last century. Why? Nostalgia. That, plus I think it’s cool how the muffin tins make clear that serving sizes have drastically changed. From the look of these tins, the regular muffin of the twenties and thirties was not much bigger than the mini-muffin of today. Another ‘feature’– a tin that makes 11 muffins? Take a look:

my grandmother’s cast iron muffin tin

My gluten-free batches didn’t yield anything ready to share, but next time I make muffins I’ll continue in that direction. That is, once I recover from eating all this week’s test batches!

Tagged as: blueberry, coconut palm sugar, macadamia nut oil