Baking Three Easy Muffin Recipes: Blueberry, Pecan, and Banana!

Well, hello and welcome to “At Home.” We’re so glad that you could be with us today. Today, we’re gonna talk about breakfast. That time of the day you know when you have to get up and get moving whether you want to or not. That time of the day when the alarm goes off and you say, “Oh, just another 10 minutes. If I just sleep for 10 more minutes.” And then 10 more minutes, and then you’re running around the house like a wild person trying to get out the door or get the kids off to school or whatever. Well, today, if that’s the scene in your house in the early morning, we’re gonna do something special for the weekends because we have to redeem all those days that we didn’t do this. So how about Saturday morning? Just tell the family the night before that we’re gonna have a special breakfast together in the morning, and nobody’s allowed to be going anywhere. You have to be at home until 10 or 11 o’clock. And then you get up in the morning and you prepare the breakfast. Now we’re gonna make it easy for you today. We’re gonna do three different kinds of muffins. Okay? And this is not just good for your family but this could be good for, like during a weekday, you might wanna prepare some and have a friend over ’cause sometimes friends just need to talk. You just need to sit together and talk, and just appreciate each other, and be thankful for friendship. If you have a friend, a friend that you can say anything to in the world, and she won’t overreact at you or tell you that you did this wrong or didn’t do this or whatever, and you have someone who will lend you their ear, then you have a great treasure. Friends are hard to come by, you know. Oh, a lot of people say, “I’m your friend.” But when it gets down to where the rubber meets the road, how many friends really do you have? Sometimes you think you have friends and they act like friends. But when there comes a pressure or a time when friendship is really, really needed, you count on them, and then you’re disappointed because they’re not there for you. I think probably all of us have gone through that. There’s nothing that hurts so deep as the betrayal of a friend. But you know, the Bible says that there’s a friend that sticks closer than a brother and his name is Jesus. He will never betray you. He will never let you down. And he’s always there. Friendship. If you’ve got a true friend and his name is Jesus, then you are a fortunate person and you are blessed. If God has given you a friend here on this Earth that you can sit at a table, enjoy a cup of coffee and a muffin with, then you’re doubly blessed. I feel honored because I have friends that I can really, truly count on. God’s been very good to me. Well, we’re gonna get on with those muffins in just a minute. Now, take a nice deep stretch because it’s morning and you’re tired. And come on, we can do this. We can make these muffins. We can prepare a nice table for our family or friends. And we’re gonna show you how in just a moment. Here’s today’s “At Home” Hint. Here’s today’s “At Home” Hint. For a special breakfast treat, sprinkle refrigerator biscuits with cinnamon, sugar, and butter buds, and bake as usual according to package directions. Thanks, B.B. from North Huntingdon, PA. If you have a helpful hint that you’d like to share with us, we want to hear from you. Send your hint to “At Home Hints” CTV, Wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. Well, the first muffin that we’re going to be preparing for our special breakfast is a banana nut muffin. Now, what I picked up for this is here’s these really big muffins. Aren’t these neat? This is nice for a he-man-sized muffin. This is a tin that is prepared special so you don’t have to… It’s got that special coating, no-stick coating. But I like to spray them with a little PAM, anyway, just in case. Now I’m going to… The recipe will make 12 regular-sized muffins or six of the the really jumbo ones. And what you do, first of all, you take 1/2 a cup of softened butter. We’re gonna put this in our mixing bowl, and a cup of sugar, one cup of sugar. And we’re gonna use the mixer ’cause this needs to cream together until it’s fluffy, light and fluffy. All right? And that shouldn’t take too long. If you have your butter hard, it really takes a long time for that to come together light and fluffy. But I think that you just need to remember, set it out the night before so it comes to room temperature, the butter, makes it easier to do, all right? Now to this, I would probably let this go a little longer, but it’ll be okay if we don’t. We’re gonna add our eggs, which is two eggs. And you want to beat after each egg. You don’t want to just pop them both in there at the same time. You want to do them one at a time and let them blend well. There, it’s all coming together now. Okay, and then we’re gonna add the second egg. I’m gonna try to do this without getting shells in it because we don’t want little crunchy shells in here. We want, well, like I said, I’m just gonna put this egg over here ’cause there’s shells over here where I tried to break it into. But not in the bananas please, or in the muffins. They’re gonna be banana nut muffins. So we’ve added two eggs. And now we’re gonna add our bananas, which is about two to three, two large or three small bananas. And they have just been mashed with a fork on a plate. And this is pretty much how I make my banana bread, starts out this way, anyway. And you can see that’s nice and light, and it’s fluffy just like that. Now, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna mix our flour, which is two cups of flour. And we’re gonna add a teaspoon of salt. Do this to the dry ingredients. A teaspoon of salt. Here’s a teaspoon of baking powder, and 1/2 a teaspoon of baking soda, just like that. And we want to mix that together just a little bit to incorporate it. It’s like we need a little bit bigger bowl here but it will be all right. And now, this is buttermilk. We have one cup of buttermilk. And we’re gonna add alternately the flour and the buttermilk. We’re gonna add 1/2 of the flour. And we’re gonna mix this up just like that. Now it’s gonna get thick. But then we’re gonna add some of the buttermilk to it too. You say, “Why buttermilk?” Well, buttermilk, the sourness and the thickness, and it makes them richer. And it really does. If you’re making biscuits, buttermilk biscuits are always lighter and tastier because they taste richer than if you use just regular milk. You’ll find cooks everywhere, that’s what they’ll do. They’ll use buttermilk because it’s richer. Now we’re gonna add the rest of our flour. I’m gonna add some buttermilk slowly because that thickens it up too much and you get lumps. So I like to add my buttermilk as the flour is incorporating, just like that. Okay. Here we go. Now, you give it a good whirl to make sure that it’s all totally mixed well together, just like this. See, it looks pretty good, doesn’t it? Now, you know, it’s not gonna be smooth. Let me tell you that. From the beginning, it will not be smooth because the bananas are in there and there’re lumps and bits of banana. And then, I don’t like to use the mixer to do this, but what we need to do is stir in the nuts and the vanilla. This is the vanilla, it’s just a teaspoon of vanilla. And about 1/2 of a cup of chopped pecans. If you wanna use walnuts, you can do that. And what I’d like to do is just fold this around or stir them in. Okay, just like that. Now we’re gonna fill our muffin tins. You have to have the oven preheated. Put this off here. Preheated to 400 degrees. Let me get some spoons here. Okay. I need a bigger spoon. Maybe I’ll just use this one. And we’re gonna fill these up pretty good. Now, remember, this normally would be enough for 12 regular size ones, and you fill them 2/3 full. Tell you what would even work better is a measuring cup when you have this much to do, all right? Excuse me, let me get a measuring cup. Here we go. Now, this is better. See, that’s what you have to adjust because sometimes you just don’t know what’s needful and what will work the best. And when you do, make the adjustments, right? All right, just spoon in it to about 2/3. What I try to do is go round all the cups first and then go back and fill it up if necessary. I remember one time making muffins, and I had them so full that when they baked, it looked like a cake because the batter was clear across the pan. You couldn’t even see where the indentations for the muffins were ’cause it just filled over the whole pan. It was quite a mess, as I remember. And that was one of those times when mom wasn’t so thrilled that she said she would do the cleanup because it was burned everywhere. It was bad. But this will work. You may have a bit more than you… If you do, if you have more batter, put them in some small muffin cups, ’cause that will be fine. No problem. And as I said, these will go into the 400 degree oven. You want to clean up the pan, because, boy, if that gets burning, it’s not a pretty smell to wake up to on a Saturday morning, right? This goes into the preheated 400 degree oven. They’re gonna bake for about 20 to 25 minutes. Okay? I’m gonna set my timer here. Now, the next one that we’re going to do, this one is called pecan, mini pecan cakes. And they are really delicious. I mean, these are different. It’s not necessarily a muffin. It’s more like a cake. And first of all, it has streusel topping to it, which makes it a little bit different. We’re gonna make the streusel topping. First of all, you need some flour, about 2/3 of a cup of flour, 1/2 a cup of firmly-packed brown sugar. This is 1/3 a cup of chopped pecans. You could use, if you’d rather have almonds or walnuts, that’s fine. 1 1/2 teaspoons of cinnamon, and 1/3 of a cup of chilled, this needs to be butter that is cold. Do not let it be room temperature because you’re going to blend this with a pastry blender. Okay? And that’s what this little thing is. And this thing works great. First of all, you mix up all of the ingredients, and then you just begin just like that to break the butter into it because this is a streusel topping. That’s what this is. Okay? And we just keep working it back and forth until it gets off this. When it’s cold like that, it’ll hang up on this pastry blender. But that’s okay, not to worry. Okay, we keep going. And this, you’re gonna set aside until you get the batter prepared. Okay? Just like this. And what you’re doing is working the butter into it to make the streusel topping, just like that. Okay. When the butter is totally incorporated, it should look like little bits of coarse meal because you don’t want big pieces of butter there. You want this incorporated completely. This might take you a little time but it’s worth it because your streusel topping will turn out better if you do it that way. If you say, “Oh, well, that’s good enough,” then you know what happens? You have a big chunk of butter that melts and then you have no streusel topping to it. It’s just the big butter, chunk of butter. So you don’t want to do that. All right, let’s see. I think we’re there. While I’m finishing this and preparing to make the cakes, we’re gonna take a break and we’ll be right back in just a minute. Well, if you’ve just joined us, we’re making muffins today for a very special breakfast for you and your family or for you and your friends. We’ve made the streusel topping for our mini pecan cakes. Now we’re gonna make the cake part of it. And what you do here is you take two cups of flour, add it to your bowl, and some baking powder. This is two teaspoons of baking powder, and some salt, 1/4 of a teaspoon of salt, some ground allspice. This is unusual, but very potent type of spice. And you only needed like an 1/8 of a teaspoon for that. All right. And 1/4 of a teaspoon of ground nutmeg. Now, if you have the fresh little, whoops, if you have the fresh little nutmeg nuts in a fresh grater, that’s fine. Or you can buy already ground, either way is fine. Let’s see, what else do we have here? And we’re going to put, I think that’s all that we put into this one. All right, now we’re going to mix together the sugar in another bowl, which is 3/4 cup of sugar, and 1/2 a cup of melted and slightly cold. You know why you slightly cool this? Because we’re gonna add eggs to it. And if this is real hot, it’ll cook your eggs and look like scrambled eggs in your muffins. Might sound good but it’s not gonna taste good or look real good. So you do your butter melted and then you cool it down just like that, and mix it with your sugar. Okay? Now we’re gonna add some vanilla. Add the vanilla, mix it about. Okay. And now we’ll add our eggs, two eggs, and just mix it up real good. This is the basis for the mini pecan cakes, just like that. And we have some milk here, 3/4 of a cup of milk. And again, you’ll notice as in the other recipe, you add alternately the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients. And so now we’re gonna stir some flour. Get a better spoon than this, I’ll tell you that. Need something that’s gonna give me some, there we go. So I add about 1/3 of the dry ingredients at a time and about the same portion of milk. Then you want to stir this to blend it really well, just like that. Okay, you don’t have to wait till you have a completely stirred up because you don’t have to wait that long. Then we’re gonna add some more flour, some more milk. Probably take a little more time doing this if I weren’t in a hurry to show you other things today. But you can tell when it’s mixed well when you’re making it at home, you’ll know that. And it just makes a batter that is gonna have a real cake taste more than a muffin or a donut or anything like that or a bread. It’s more like a cake taste ’cause this is really kind of a cake-ish batter here. And the last amount. Now, what we’ll do is spoon this into these cups. Now I’ve just paper-lined some muffin cups here. If you want to use, you can just grease them the old-fashioned way. That’s fine. I think the cleanup’s a little easier this way. And I kinda like that. But what we’ll do here is spoon this into the cups. This will make between 12 and 15 normal regular size muffins. And then we’re gonna put our streusel topping on top of it. Get some spoons here, and show you what I mean. We’ll spoon ’em about 2/3 full, just like that. Okay? And the go into a 350 degree oven, and they bake for about 20 to 25 minutes because this is a little different. These are a little longer than the others. Some of them bake about 12 to 15, some bake 15 to 18. But like I said, because these are more of a cake texture, the dryer texture, you’re gonna see that these will take a little different, a little longer baking time. Now, instead of taking the time to finish that, I’m gonna show you what you do with the streusel topping. This is the topping. And once you have this made, you take a nice handful, and you put it on each one, and you pack it in. You pack it in just like that. You’re gonna have to clean up your pan before you put in the oven. So don’t worry about making it a mess. ‘Cause when that stuff bakes over, you’re in trouble. You are in trouble. The cleanup is not fun. That’s why it’s nice to have girls clean up like I do here at the program. ‘Cause they know if there’s a bowl in the cupboard, I’ll have it out and I’ll have it a mess, I never rinse anything out. That would be too easy. Right? Okay, so these will then go into the oven and they’ll bake for, like I said, 20 to 25 minutes. The third one I want to show you is the blueberry-filled one and I hope we have the time to do this. We’ll talk about it if we don’t. First of all, this goes in a 350 degree oven. We’re going to beat together our butter, which is 1 1/2 cups of butter. Just doesn’t look like it’s quite enough, but we’ll see. All right. And let me see here, 1 1/2 cups of butter. Okay, let me make sure here. Beat together sugar and butter until fluffy. All right, let’s do that. We’ll have the recipe completed for you. Linda is telling me something different and I really don’t know which it is, to be honest with you. Okay. And we’ll use the electric mixer till we cream it, just like that. And it’s really important for you to have your butter at room temperature ’cause does mix better, just like that. And to this then, we’re gonna add our eggs very similar to the way we did it before. We’re gonna add them one at a time. For time’s sake today, I’m gonna add them all at one time. And this is four eggs. Now this makes a lot. Okay. You know, I always tell you to do them in a dish, and not do them directly into what you’re making. Well, sometimes when you’re in a hurry, you just can’t do that. And this is one of those times. And we’re making a batter, and these are gonna go into muffin cups, okay? And we’re gonna add the vanilla. You’re gonna want to have some frozen blueberries prepared and ready, and your milk. And we’re gonna add flour, baking powder, and salt to this, and some lemon zest, all right? I’m gonna talk you through it since we’re running out of time. You’re gonna add that together to this, and you’re gonna make your batter and you’re gonna put it in your muffin cups. And then you’re gonna take a spoonful of blueberries and put it on top of it. When it bakes, the muffin will come up over the blueberries and it will be a blueberry-filled muffin. We’ll be right back to show you exactly what this is all about in just a moment. Here’s how you can get today’s recipes.

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Well, here we’re at the table, the breakfast table, with the three kind of muffins that we’ve prepared for you today. We’ve added a nice pot of hot coffee ’cause you couldn’t have breakfast without hot coffee, right? I have a friend whose husband prepares coffee for her and puts it in one of those Thermos things so that when she gets up a little later, she has hot coffee. Now that’s a neat guy. But anyway, we added some orange juice and some fresh fruit, maybe a little bit of preserves. And here are mini pecan cakes with a little bit of a glaze. I just added a little glaze to the top of it. Our blueberry-filled muffins, ah! And our jumbo banana nut muffins, they’re in the front. Just a very easy, very simple, but a really nice breakfast. Wouldn’t you like to wake up to it tomorrow morning? Better believe it. And you know the ingredient that is most prevalent in all of these recipes is love. And you do that because you care about what you’re doing for your family or your friends. I know that if my friend called and said, “Arlene, why don’t you stop by? Let’s have breakfast.” And I walked in the door, and I could smell the coffee and I could smell the muffins baking, I would think that she thought I was really special. And you know, I think that you’re really special because you join us every week. And just remember, if you’ve got a friend that you haven’t talked to for a long time or you haven’t seen for a long time, why don’t you give them a call and invite them for breakfast? Or make this for Saturday morning for your family. Be sure to join us the next time because it just wouldn’t be the same without you here “At Home.” See you then. Bye-bye.

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