SMS: Lemon-Orange Blueberry Muffins with Pecan Crumble

First of all, Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there including mine! We love you all!

Wow. It's been quite the crazy 2 week stretch! Yesterday, my husband graduated yesterday with his Pharm.D., so we've had graduation activities for most of the weekend. It's been fun, and I couldn't be more proud of him :-)

Anyway, back to the muffins. This week's SMS was hosted by Chaya at My Sweet and Savory. In the Sweet Melissa Baking Book, Melissa has a basic muffin recipe with a page or two about different add-ins that would be good. The group had already baked a couple different variations before I joined, but I was excited for these because blueberry is one of my favorites. Adding any type of crumble onto that makes it that much more delicious!

In the past when the group made the muffins, there were several comments that the batter ended up heavy and the muffins a little bit dry. Given this, I considered swapping some of the butter for a little bit of unsweetened applesauce. I often do this in muffins and quick breads to decrease fat in recipes, especially when the ingredient list calls for oil. The applesauce also helps the muffins stay moist, although you need to be really careful not to overmix the batter.  Despite the comments, I didn't make the applesauce swap here. I like to try to stay pretty true to recipes when I make them for the first time, so that I don't goof things up too much! That said, the batter was heavy, and I would consider swapping in some applesauce in the future.

  

I did leave in the lemon zest called for in the base recipe. I wasn't for sure if we were suppose to completely swap the lemon zest for the orange zest, so I just added both figuring that it would just contribute some extra citrus flavor. Whether or not we were suppose to do it, the combination of the lemon-orange flavors was great! I also used the skim milk that we have in the fridge rather than whole milk. We don't use that much milk to begin with, and buying even a small container of whole milk would have been a waste. I suppose this may have contributed to the consistency of the batter a little bit. However, other bakers also seemed to have that issue.

My other slight variation from the recipe was that I mixed the batter up the night before, covered it, and baked the muffins right away in the morning. This worked great as we got warm muffins for breakfast that I really didn't have to wake up any earlier to make. All that I had to do was spoon the batter into the muffin cups, add the crumble, and bake. Perfect for rushed mornings :-)

Overall, we really enjoyed the overall flavors of the muffins and the pecan crumble. My husband has already been asking me to put these on the "make again" list. Check out muffins from the other SMS bakers here. I've seen some comments that adding a little bit more cream or even some OJ also helped a bit with the dryness. Enjoy!