Use This Trick To Keep Berries From Sinking To The Bottom Of Muffins
Of all the breakfast pastries out there, fluffy, domed muffins have got to be one of the most delicious. A warm, tender-crumbed muffin — whether it's of the zucchini banana bread, pecan pie, or spiced cranberry variety — is pretty hard to beat alongside a hot cup of coffee or a cold glass of milk. Perhaps the most iconic of all muffin types is blueberry, an instantly recognizable treat that's wonderful when perfumed with vanilla extract and warming spices.
Like most quick breads, muffins are pretty easy to whip up at home, but there's a particular challenge posed by berry muffins: The heavy fruit tends to sink to the bottom of the muffin, causing uneven distribution. The berries also tend to burst on the bottom of the muffin liner, making it hard to peel off without sacrificing some fruit (via Kitchn). Luckily, there's a super simple trick for keeping berries from sinking to the bottom of muffins, and it doesn't involve tossing the fruit in flour.
Scoop some plain batter into the muffin tin first
Have you ever heard of tossing berries in flour before mixing them into muffin dough in order to keep the fruit from sinking to the bottom? Serious Eats not only heard of it, they tried it — and found it doesn't work at all. Instead, the site shares a tip that most definitely does: mixing your muffin batter sans berries, scooping a small amount into the bottom of each muffin cup, and then mixing the berries into the rest of the batter and distributing it evenly into the muffin tin. Serious Eats writes that this really does keep the berries away from the very bottom of the muffin.
In addition to keeping any paper liners you've used free from berry splatter, the publication notes that this technique has an added benefit: The bottoms of the muffins will brown more evenly in the absence of wet fruit. And who doesn't love a well-browned muffin bottom?