An Old Fashioned Cooking Date

I long for an occasional rainy day in the summer. Sunshine and warm weather, enjoyable as they are, scatter friends at pools, lakes and beaches and hinder precious cooking together times. Throw in various vacation schedules and weeks go by in the summer where cooking with friends just doesn’t happen. But on rainy days there are always friends with canceled plans eager to cook together. So, last week, when the weather threw a monkey wrench into my beach plans, Debbie and I decided to have an old fashioned summer cooking date. She was hoping to cook breads and nibbles to bring on her vacation and I was happy to make anything. We whipped up some moist and delicious lemon blueberry muffins with a crumble topping, hoping to lure buyers to our kids’ lemonade stand and then baked a few loaves of lemon blueberry bread for the freezer.

Here’s the recipe:

Two-Bite Lemon Blueberry Muffins
Adapted from Gourmet cookbook

Makes two dozen

For the Batter:

6 tablespoons butter, melted
1/3 cup milk
1 large egg plus one egg yolk
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
¾ cup white sugar
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup blueberries

For the topping:

Mix together 3 tablespoons cold butter, ½ cup flour and 4 tablespoons sugar with your hands until crumbly.

Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees and spray two mini muffin tins with baking spray.

In a large bowl, whisk together melted butter, milk, egg, yolk, lemon zest and sugar. In a smaller bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder and salt. Stir the dry ingredients into the wet until combined and then fold in the blueberries carefully.

Spoon mixture evenly into prepared muffin tins and divide crumble evenly among the muffins.

Bake for approximately 15 minutes until cooked through.