Cooking School: Bakery Style Muffins
There are a few tricks to baking a bakery style muffin. By "bakery style muffin" I mean a muffin that has a slight crispness to its muffin top, is moist and fluffy inside and is exactly halfway between being coarse and being cake-like. Most importantly, a bakery style muffin has a big, domed top taking up about 50% of the muffin. Kelli, from Lovescool, and I have been pondering the all important question of how to achieve this.
The main thing in achieving a stable, domed rise is to have a thick batter leavened with baking powder. Yogurt is what makes the batter so thick in this recipe. Baking powder will give the muffin plenty of verticle lift, while a muffin leavened only with baking soda would spread a bit, tending to have a flatter top. Overfilling the muffin tins, by which I actually mean coming up to the top of the tin or slightly higher with the batter, will let these muffins have a nice crisp ledge, like a bakery muffin. You can see that I didn't overfill mine quite enough; the ledge is quite small in the photo.
Moisture comes from butter, sugar and eggs. The editors of The Best Recipe
The muffins turned out exactly as promised: domed, beautiful and very bakery-like. They tasted great, with a firmer edge and moist interior. You can add 1 1/2 cups of fruit (fresh or frozen) to the batter, much as Elise has done with her Blueberry Muffins, based on the same recipe. I added some cinnamon and 1 cup of chocolate and cinnamon chips instead. Served warm and with a bit of butter, they were very delicious, though I migh go for a cherry/chocolate combination next time....
Cinnamon Chocolate Chip Bakery-Style Muffins
(Adapted from The Best Recipe
3 cups ap flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
10 tbsp unsalted butter, very soft
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups plain low fat yogurt
3/4 cup (generous) chocolate chips
1/4 cup cinnamon chips
Preheat oven to 375F and grease a 12 cup muffin tin with cooking spray.
Whisk flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon together in a medium bowl.
Cream together butter and sugar in a large bowl, adding eggs one at a time. Beat in vanilla.
Alternate yogurt and flour into butter mixture, ending with the flour and working in 2 or three additions. Stir in chocolate and cinnamon chips.
Divide batter evenly among muffin cups, filling them to the top or slightly higher and bake for 20-25 minutes, until golden brown and a tester comes out clean (Note: with fruit instead of chocolate chips, you may have to increase baking time by a few minutes).
Cool on a wire rack.
Makes 12 large muffins
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