Blueberry Muffin Mania...

For days I have been planning on making a few batches of muffins for Grayson's school snacks.  I usually take an afternoon while Emerson naps to stock up. Grayson's muffins of choice are blueberry or banana bran.  Today was a non-nap day for Em so I decided to make the muffins with her since she usually wakes up to the smell and doesn't get to help.  She pulled up her small, white, spindle legged chair, asked me to tie her apron, and we started with blueberry...


Wanna know my secret to the BEST blueberry muffins?  Its called...Betty Crocker Wild Blueberry Muffin Mix.  I know, I know.  I am a big-from-scratch-no-pre-made food kinda girl but this is one of the two instances where I make an exception, (cake mix being the other) I have made so many scratch recipes for blueberry muffins but Grayson always prefers his favorite...Betty.  Gotta love her...I like to imagine her as a sweet old grandma, with white hair pulled back in a bun, making blueberry muffins in her yellow and red kitchen, not knowing what an impact her sweet recipe would have on our family. 


I always make 2 boxes at a time and to give it my fresh-from-scratch addition I add a basket of farm fresh organic blueberries to the recipe in place of the canned blueberries. This way the kids get a bit of vitamins and antioxidants from the fresh, big, purple, juicy blueberries...I make the muffins according to the package except I use half the amount of oil that the recipe calls for. I bake them...and when I take them out of the oven I let them cool a bit. I keep about six on a plate on the stove (which doesn't usually last through the night) and the rest go on a large plate in the freezer for a few hours.  When they are frozen, I then transfer them all to a big ziplock bag and throw them back in the freezer. 


Each morning when I'm making Grayson's lunch, I take out one frozen muffin (usually trading off each day with either blueberry or banana bran) and put it in its own small ziplock in his lunch box.  By the time snack time comes at school, it has defrosted and he has a healthy snack to keep his little 1st grade brain working hard until lunch.  I will also put them in Emerson's snack bag if we are doing errands or going to the park. Works like an ice pack and keeps her cheese stick cold until she's ready to eat it.


So, as I was making the muffins today, I was thinking I was on auto pilot, as I make them so often, but because I was talking to my 3 year old little miss,  I added too much milk to the recipe and had to add one more box of muffin mix.  I guess there was a reason that I bought extra blueberries at the farm yesterday.  I baked so many muffins that I had to put the air conditioner on in the house because it was hotter than hot in my kitchen...


So here we are...the boys are at baseball practice and Emerson and I are about to play dominoes on the coffee table...a beautiful spring day, the smell of fresh muffins throughout the house...maybe tomorrow will be a banana bran muffin day...and a new recipe post...
Until we meet again...
Lorin