Muffin Mondays: Strawberry Streusel Muffins

I think I've mentioned before that I love all sorts of fruit, and the only fruit that I won't touch is a banana. I'm just starting to get into veggies, and I rather have to make a conscious effort to eat my veggies. I crave fruit, but I rarely, if ever, crave vegetables. My mom blames this on her feeding me too much fruit , and not enough vegetables, as a baby. Apparently she switched up the feeding routine with my brother and sister, and they both like their veggies. My sister isn't a big fruit girl, though, and she'd rather have spinach or carrots than a strawberry. That's so odd to me, but I'm kind of jealous, too. At any rate, spring has arrived and I've been craving strawberries. I love to eat them plain, and I strawberry pie is one of my all time favorite desserts. I don't usually like to bake with strawberries because I think they get kind of gross and they tend make the baked good kind of funky-gummy, but strawberry muffins popped into my head last week, and I just couldn't get the idea out of my head.

Yesterday Dudley and I got to run in the annual Cherry Blossom 10 Mile Run. I really wanted to run in this race last year, but I was on a plane on the morning of the signup and I didn't get a spot. This year there was a lottery for spots, and I was so excited that we were able to get race numbers! It was a perfect day for running yesterday, and when the race was over I immediately turned my thoughts to our post-run brunch. I thought of making strawberry crepes (YUM!) but the crepe batter needs to sit for an hour in the refrigerator before it's ready to be used, so I tossed out that idea. Then it occured to me that this might just be the perfect time to try out some strawberry muffins. 

As you might imagine, a strawberry muffin recipe isn't nearly as easy to locate as a recipe for, say, a blueberry muffin. I was wary of just changing a berry muffin to suit strawberries because of the aforementioned watery issue that strawberries tend to have when they're baked. Eventually, I came across a recipe that linked back to a Cook's Illustrated "Any-Fruit-Will-Do" muffin recipe. How cool. It turns out that you can switch out strawberries for other berries in muffin recipes. 

As I continue my foray into the world of muffins, there are some things I've discovered. One, it's nearly impossible to find a muffin recipe that doesn't require at least two bowls, one for dry ingredients, and one for wet, and very often, a bowl for melting your butter, too. Oh, and another bowl for the streusel sometimes, too. This recipe, thankfully, calls for oil, so I got to skip the butter-melting step. I wanted to cut up the strawberries small enough so that they wouldn't be too watery, but big enough so that they were noticable. Really, dicing the strawberries is the biggest hassle of the recipe. After you have the strawberries diced, it's all downhill until you have to wash the dishes. The recipe calls for buttermilk (I love recipes that call for buttermilk because I think it gives baked goods an amazing flavor and texture. I almost always have buttermilk in my fridge.) and oil, two things that I think are responsible for the excellent texture and flavor of these muffins. It also calls for brown sugar rather than white sugar, another great choice flavor-wise. The streusel is a walnut brown sugar topping, and I'll admit that I was wary of it because walnuts are very far down on my list of "nuts that I enjoy eating" but they turned out to be a really great choice because the topping is the perfect accompaniment to the muffin. 

If you didn't guess already, these are some very tasty muffins! They're sweeter than the blueberry muffins I made last weekend, and I've actually been eating them as dessert. I think that they fall into the "anytime" category of muffins, but make no mistake, these are muffins, not cupcakes. The texture is wonderful, they're tender and fluffy, and I la-la-love the strawberry bits in the muffin. In fact, the only thing that I would change would be to try and ramp up the strawberry factor a bit more. I was really pleased to discover that the strawberries don't make for a soggy muffin, and these muffins are tasty even 24 hours later.

Strawberry Streusel Muffins

makes 12 muffins

adapted from Cook's Illustrated

Ingredients

Streusel Topping

1/3 cup brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1/2 cup finely chopped walnuts (I ground mine in my little mini prep)

Muffins

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 1/3 cups light brown sugar

2/3 cup vegetable oil

1 tablespoon grated orange zest (you could really sub the citrus of your choice, I'm sure that lemon would be lovely)

1 egg

1 cup buttermilk

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

about 2 cups diced strawberries

1. For the topping, mix sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl or workbowl of a food processor; add butter. If mixing by hand, use fingertips, a pastry blender, or 2 forks to blend the fat into dry ingredients until mixture looks like coarse irregular crumbs, with no visible lumps of fat. If mixing in a food processor, pulse about 10 times, then process 5 to 10 seconds, until there are no visible lumps of fat; stir in nuts and set aside.
2. For the muffins, adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 400 degrees. Lightly grease the top surface of a 12-cup muffin pan; use liners, if necessary. Whisk 2 1/2 cups flour with next 4 ingredients in a medium bowl; set aside.
3. Whisk together next 4 ingredients in a large bowl; whisk in buttermilk and vanilla. Gently whisk dry ingredients into wet ingredients to partially blend. Continue mixing batter with a rubber spatula, making sure that ingredients at the bottom are incorporated into batter; fold in fruit. (Frozen fruit will help “firm” up batter. If batter seems too wet, add a few more tablespoons of flour — up to 1/4 cup — to stiffen batter.)
4. Using an ice-cream scoop, place a portion of batter into each muffin cup, filling to the brim. Sprinkle a portion of streusel topping over batter in each muffin cup.
5. Bake 15 minutes; reduce heat to 350 degrees and bake until muffins are golden brown and spring back when lightly pressed with fingertips, 10 to 12 minutes. Let muffins cool in pan for 5 minutes then transfer them to a wire rack. Serve warm or at room temperature.