Lemon Blueberry Muffins

One of my favourite fruit dessert flavours is lemon. For the longest time, the only lemon dessert I had tried was a lemon tart and a good lemon tart is one of the best things ever! The idea of this tangy flavour with the right amount of sugar is just so exciting!

When I started baking more regularly a few years ago, I discovered lemon cake. And what a delicious discovery that was! Moist, tangy, light and just divine. Because I loved the lemon cake so much, I began reading up on other flavours that work well with lemon and a lot of recipes talked about blueberry. Now we don’t get blueberry very easily here. The fresh ones are hardly there for a few weeks and even then are fairly expensive. The dried ones are found more regularly and are not as expensive. I figured I should at least try the flavour combination out. Turns out – SUPER idea! 🙂

I tried this recipe a few times before I found, what I believe, is the best version 🙂 I played around with leavening agents (baking soda vs powder), amount of lemon, how much the pan was filled etc. Delicious experiments, I tell you 😉

These muffins are tall and springy. Light. Balanced in terms of sweet and lemon-y. YUM.

I find that making these with just baking soda, given the lemon, yoghurt and brown sugar, works best. Baking soda is needed when there is acid in the ingredients (yoghurt, lemon, buttermilk, vinegar, brown sugar etc). This works because baking soda is a base (remember chem lab?) and reacts with the acid to create bubbles. Bubbles = Rise. *Geek Alert* You need to add only as much baking soda as is needed for the recipe. In this case, I tested a version with both baking powder and soda and one with just baking soda. I realized just the soda worked better for me.

The first time I made these, I filled the muffin liners just 1/2 way up, like with cupcakes. Rookie mistake. Since there is no frosting on top, I actually want the muffins to rise up nice and high, not stay within the liner height. So the next time I filled them up almost to the top. Voila, tall, golden muffins, with nice smooth tops 🙂

So pretty, right? 😀

These muffins are not too sweet thanks to balance between lemon juice, lemon zest and brown sugar. The blueberries burst in the mouth and are simply spectacular. Fresh blueberries would be even better, so if you can, get your hands on some.

When I took these to work, they were polished off within the hour. That good. And they don’t leave you feeling heavy. They’re like little bites of sunshine 🙂

Go on, you know you want to try it!