Filling the Molds and Baking the Blueberry Lemon Muffins

Karen Stiegler: Hi! I am Karen Stiegler and I am here today talking to you about healthy baking and showing you how to prepare Blueberry Lemon Muffins. So now we're going to fill the molds and bake the muffins. And for this I like to use a scoop, like an ice cream scoop, maybe you already have this at home. The advantage to this is it's clean, it's not very messy and also you can make sure that your muffins are uniform and fine. That's kind of nice when you are presenting them all together.

So what you want to do, is to just use the scoop, try to get you know, about the same sized scoop in each muffin tin, each paper-lined mold. Now we already talked about lining the molds so I have got them all ready to go here with my paper liners, but you could have the foil or you could prepare them with baking tray that's totally fine. But what I am going to show you now is how to use the raw or turbinado sugar to garnish.

So I just have this little packages of raw sugar that I bought in the store. You can also have a larger box or a larger bag, this is just what I happened to have. I don't need that much, so these are pretty convenient. So let me just show you, this is a coarse grain, it's a larger grain of sugar and it's like a nice beautiful brown color and it's really sparkling. So you can see it here in this bowl, okay. So that's why I like to use it. It's nice to use it for the garnish on top in this recipe because we only one third cup of sugar for the entire recipe of muffins, so it just gives a little bit extra sweetness on the top of the muffin and a little bit of crunch and sparkly colour, so it's a really nice touch.

So you can either use your fingers to gently sprinkle the sugar on or just straight out of the small packets and use as much as you like, great. So that is how we fill the molds, now we are going to bake it in the oven. You already have your oven preheated at 400 degrees and you know because you have your oven thermometer hopefully and it's ready to put in. So we will just put it in and we woll bake it for 18-20 minutes and then remove it.

So now we have our muffins, they are fully baked and you can tell that they're done, because they have a nice beautiful golden color to them and they are firm and we bake them for 18-20 minutes depending on your oven. What I suggest is the first time you bake the muffins, write down, how long you bake them in your oven, because really it should go not on time, time is just the guide, but you should go on how they look and how they feel. So much you have it down for your oven, make a note and then you'll always know when you make the recipe.

So you want to take them out of the muffin cups, you don't want to let them sit in the muffin cups too long because they can get more and make it little bit of soggy the bottom. So, what you want to do is just gently use you know a cake spatula or have a fork here, just gently lift them out and place them on the cooling rack.

So now our muffins have been cooling on the rack for a few minutes, so we can go ahead and plate them and I just have a nice tray and you can also use like a doyley or whatever you like and I am just going to place them on and I want to point out to you that they have this beautiful sparkly finish, that's from the turbinado sugar, the raw sugar that we used.

And also I want to mention one other thing to you about the difference between a muffin and a cup cake. A lot of people think what is the difference? There is no difference between a muffin and a cup cake. Because they are kind of the same shape. But to me there is a big difference. Muffins are of more dense, firm texture and they are sort of a hardier more rustic, bake good and they are very similar to the quick bread recipes that you might have made before like banana bread and things like that. This is same sort of method. Cup cakes are much softer and have a finer crumb and texture and the idea with cup cakes, is to get air into the cake batter and to incorporate that fluffiness and that airiness and that is why with cake batters, you usually cream the butter with the sugar and you beat that together to get that airiness. Whereas this is it's a totally different method. The method was we just dumped the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and mix it together until it just mixed we do not over mix it, then we mix then our fruit or nuts or whatever else you would have.

The other difference between a cup cake and a muffin for me is for muffins we only had one egg in this recipe and I really prefer that for my muffins, for cup cakes you usually you have two eggs or even more at sometimes for cake recipes, you have up to three or four eggs. So that's the basic difference between a muffin and a cup cake just so you know.

So now we have our Blueberry Lemon Muffins and I hope that will you continue to bake healthy and I hope that you'll try this recipe and I wish you a happy baking.