When I came home with a few hard-won cups of huckleberries recently, it did not take me long to figure out what to do with them: Make muffins.
I’ve loved blueberry muffins for decades, especially toasted with butter. I ate lots of them when I ran the deli in the basement of the SUNY Stony Brook student union, years ago. And since huckleberries are really just a West Coast variant of the blueberry, I decided to give this a go.
But I’d never made muffins before. Ever. So I read up on blueberry muffins. A lot. And, after reading something like 20 recipes for blueberry or huckleberry muffins, this is what I came up with. My largest inspiration came from Deb at Smitten Kitchen, and from the fact that I had some creme fraiche in the fridge leftover from a batch of elderberry creme fraiche ice cream. Good thing, too, because the addition gives these muffins a lovely tang; you could substitute sour cream or a Greek yogurt if you want.
Makes 9-11 muffins
- 5 tablespoons butter
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 egg
- 3/4 cup creme fraiche, Greek yogurt or sour cream
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose or cake flour
- 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
- A heaping 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 to 3/4 cup wild huckleberries or blueberries
- Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and grease up a muffin pan.
- Beat the butter and sugar together until they are light and airy. Add the egg and beat to combine.
- Mix in the creme fraiche.
- Whisk together all the dry ingredients until they are well combined, then mix it into the wet ingredients. Don’t overwork the batter, which will be thick. You just want to get all the flour incorporated into everything.
- Fold in the huckleberries. Do this in small batches so you have as few clumps of berries in your muffins as possible. You want to get them evenly distributed.
- Use an ice cream scoop or large spoon to fill the muffin pan — only fill them 2/3 to 3/4 of the way, as the batter expands a lot in cooking.
- Bake for 20-30 minutes, or until you see a little browning, and when a toothpick jammed into a muffin comes out clean (not including blueberry juice).
