Cinnamon Blueberry Muffins #MuffinMonday

A basic muffin recipe is a great thing to have in your repertoire.  Once you have the essential liquids and dry ingredients in place, flavor changes are easy to make by swapping the fruit or adding zest, extracts or even chocolate chips.

Have you ever taken a class, whether when still in school or outside the classroom environment, where you have learned so much that when you get home, you feel like the information must be pouring out of your brain through your ears?  That’s how I felt on Saturday evening.

A couple of months ago I signed up for one-day Food Bloggers Connect workshop right here in Dubai.  Two wonderful experts would teach an eager cohort about photography, recipe development and how to improve blog appeal.  There would be individual blogs critiques and hands-on food photography sessions.  We were asked to bring our cameras, naturally, and any props we wanted to use, so I decided to bring a cake stand.  Suddenly, in the middle of the night before, it occurred to me that I couldn’t just bring a cake stand!  It needed to have something on it, right?  Who takes photos of just the stand?  Also, one of my personal challenges is always how to make photos of my muffins look interesting week after week.  So maybe I should take some of those.

Early that morning I mixed up a quick batch of cinnamon blueberry muffin batter.  I baked half in a six-cup muffin pan and half in a small tube pan.  And, powdered sugar sprinkler in hand, I raced off to class.

As it turned out, the organizers had ordered a bunch of fancy cakes for the exercises so my cake wouldn’t have been necessary but I am pleased to say my small group used it for one of the photo sessions, bless them, and another group chose to set up the muffins.  And I came away simply bursting with information about photographing food and how to improve my blog that I am still trying to absorb.

The cake, as we set it up for the photo session.

As you can see, this muffin recipe is extremely versatile, working just as well for 12 muffins as it does in a regular cake pan as a coffee cake. (Or half and half!)  Just increase the baking time to 35-40 minutes or until the toothpick comes out clean, if you are making a whole cake rather than muffins.

Ingredients
2 cups or 250g all purpose flour
3/4 cup or 170g sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup or 240ml milk
1/2 cup or 120ml canola oil
2 large eggs
1 generous cup or about 175g fresh or frozen blueberries. (Mine were frozen.)

Optional: powdered sugar for decoration when serving

Method
Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C and prepare your muffin pan by greasing it or lining it with paper muffin cups.

In a large bowl, mix together the flour, the sugar, baking powder, salt and cinnamon and stir well.

In another bowl, whisk together the milk, oil and eggs.

Pour your wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and fold them together until just mixed.

Your wet ingredients will be lovely and yellow, like this. 

Fold in your blueberries.

Divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups.

If you are only making muffins, use a 12-cup pan! 

Bake in the preheated oven about 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Cool on a rack for a few minutes and then remove the muffins to cool completely.

Sprinkle with some powdered sugar, if desired.

This was the quick photo I took before rushing off to class Saturday morning.
The one at the top of the post was taken during the workshop. 

Enjoy!