Notes about Recipes in this book

• Lemon blueberry muffins

  • ashallen on September 09, 2019

    Good muffins with good flavor and a tender (but not overly tender) texture. Be careful not to underbake - they tend towards gumminess if underbaked - particularly when using frozen blueberries (which is most of the time for me). I've found that splitting the batter for the 12 muffins between two standard 12-muffin pans helps them bake better - more thorough and even. [Cross-post Annual Edition/Magazine/Cook's Ill. Cookbook.]

• Banana walnut muffins

  • mfto on May 30, 2011

    Perhaps I shouldn't rate these because I am not a great baker. My husband really liked these and he is not a muffin fan. In my pans I got 20 muffins rather than 12. I put pizza stone to heat with oven and then placed filled pans on the stone. Don't know if this made any difference but they were nicely browned.

• Lemon poppy seed muffins

  • ashallen on December 07, 2020

    These are delicious muffins with big, lightly crusty muffin-tops and a moist, tender, fluffy interior. Definitely more like cake than bread. Lemon flavor was very good - the lemon syrup brushed on the muffins after baking was a big (if slightly sticky) boost. The tops were crunchiest the day the muffins were made, softening after storage, but these otherwise kept very well over a few days. Recipe says to bake *all* of the batter in a standard 12-cup muffin tin. After loading up my tin as much as I dared, I had enough leftover batter to make 3 additional muffins in a second tin. Even with that adjustment, some batter oozed over the full 12-cup tin's edges during baking, so next time I'll try making 18 muffins in 2 tins. The muffin-tops in the full tin merged into one giant muffin-top and had to be cut apart, so the muffin-tops were square. Removed from oven once centers were in 205-208F range and tops were nicely browned - worked well.

  • stef on December 07, 2020

    Everything Ashallen has said about these muffins. I've been baking them since '97. Love the lemony taste and crunch of poppy seeds.