Preparing the Ingredients and Oven for the Blueberry Lemon Muffins

Karen Stiegler: Hi! I'm Karen Stiegler and I'm here today to talk to you about healthy baking and to show you how to make Blueberry Lemon Muffins. First of all, I'd like to talk to you about preparing the ingredients, the oven and the pan.

As far as the oven, of course, you won't allow plenty of time to pre-heat the oven and it's a good idea to use one of these, oven thermometer. You can get these at any grocery store or you can get them at kitchen stores whatever. They're easy to find and not expensive. It's a good idea to have one of these and just keep it in your oven. And that way you'll know when the temperature is actually the temperature you need. It won't be this much for you looking at your temperature on the outside of your oven, but you'll know for sure because everybody's oven runs different and maybe your oven is not as hot or as cooler than you thought. So this way you'll know for sure. So I really suggest doing that.

So we're going to pre-heat our oven to 400 degrees for this recipe. As far as the pan, today we're using a 12-cup muffin tin and this also come in 6 cups, but for today we're going to use the 12-cup, because we're making 12 muffins. There is a couple of different things you can do. You can use paper baking cup or they also come in foil. You can get these at any grocery store and you want to just place one in each of the mold. The foil often comes with foil and paper so you can use both or you can use them in combination, whatever you like. The other thing you can do is if you don't have the muffin cups or you don't want to use those, you can use a baking spray of some sort and just spray the inside of each mold and that way that will prevent your muffins from sticking as well.

Now, coming up in our next segment, we're going to show you how to measure flour and other dry ingredients.