Petra Cox: I am Petra Cox with Moms Apple Pie Company in Occoquan Virginia and today we are going to make muffins. We are going to make blueberry muffins, but you can use this basic batter recipe to make any kind of fruit or nut muffins that you like.

So, first of all we are going to measure and mix the dry ingredients. When you are measuring flour, its important that the flour is actually loosely sitting in the measuring cup. So, if you just measure out your flour and then cut whats off the top, rather than packing it in, you are going to get the appropriate measure.

So, there we go, two, three cups, four cups, five cups and six cups, so you can just use your knife to scrape off the excess flour off the top and then you have a nice loose cup of flour, which is the standard measure that they are calling for in a recipe. So, we are also going to do three cups of granulated sugar. These three cups and were going to need six teaspoons of baking powder and the baking powder container is usually have a handy little scraper on top, so that you can take off the excess of the top of teaspoon. Three, four, five, and six teaspoons. Then we are going to use three teaspoons of salt. Here we go and just so that I mixed it evenly, Id just like to use a whisk because there is so many points at which is integrating the ingredients. So, this is a lot unlike a cookie or a cake recipe where you cream the butter and the sugar together because we are going to use the dry ingredients and then the butter will be melted. So, its really easy recipe just to make in a big bowl and not have to use a mixer, or a stand mixer, or anything. So, weve got our dry ingredients and for our wet ingredients, we are going to have our half dozen eggs that well crack into the bowl. We are going to use a medium size bowl for this. Im going to breakout the whisk again just to mix that. Into that I am going to add the cup and quarter of whole milk. The reason I am mixing these two together before adding the other wet ingredients, the melted butter is that, if you just add the melted butter to the cracked eggs, the eggs are sort of going to cook before they are even put in the oven. So, we got to make sure that doesnt happen by mixing it with the milk first. So, that was three sticks of melted better that we put in there and just for a little extra flavor, we are going to put three teaspoons of vanilla, real vanilla not the artificial stuff, nothing beats real vanilla.

So, there we have our dry ingredients the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt and the wet ingredients the butter, milk, eggs, and vanilla and we are just going to quickly combine them and here I am using a whisk, you can use a just a regular old fashioned wooden spoon as well, but I find that this mixes different areas of the dry and wet ingredients sort of more quickly and pretty efficiently too. So, its just going to incorporate the ingredients without having to do it quite as much work.

So, you dont want to over mix this. Its okay if there is just a few lumps of flour whatever there may be in there, all the ingredients need to be moistened and incorporated together.

So, at this point you have a slightly lumpy batter, but you are ready to put whatever filling you need to in there and you can use blueberries. We are going to use six cups of blueberries or you can use cranberry and nuts or whatever kind of filling you would like to use. So, I am going to get our blueberries.