Culinary Tip: Incorporating Frozen Blueberries into Muffins

Have you ever found an awesome blueberry muffin recipe,

pulled your--almost--forsaken stash of frozen blueberries from the freezer,

gently folded them into the muffin batter,

and felt quizzical pangs as the batter turned from a beautiful creamy golden to an unwelcome gloomy gray/green?

You probably thought to yourself: hmm, maybe as the batter gets baked under high temperature this unfortunate colour will magically disappear into thin, hot oven air.

So, you bake it until the timer dings.

You *cross your fingers*.

You take a bite, only to find that the whole muffin has turned greenish-gray

It's one of the most frustrating things to me, because it simply just does not look like the blueberry muffins you would find at a bakery. With my perfectionist tendencies, (a bittersweet personality, really), I not only want my food to taste good, but I want it to look good!

Yes the greenish-gray blueberry muffins still taste delicious, but they don't look as delicious as they potentially could, (...unless you're aiming for greenish-gray look...for some odd reason).

And remember, it's just a common fact that you don't solely eat with your mouth (taste), you eat with your nose (smell) and your EYES (sight).

So how do the bakeries do it? How do they achieve those perfect, golden blueberry muffins even while using frozen blueberries?

Truthfully, I have never baked blueberry muffins at a bakery, so I have no idea how they do it.
But, I do know how I do it! :)

1. Put frozen blueberries in a colander, place it in the sink and run it under cold water. Do this until they thaw and the purpley-pink juice ceases to drain.

2. Lay the blueberries out onto a paper towel/cloth and pat to dry.

3. Place blueberries in a bowl, sprinkle with flour, and toss them around until all of the blueberries are evenly coated with the flour.

4. Gently fold them into your muffin batter and continue on normally with your recipe.

As you can see from my photo above, this method seriously works! Also, hindsight teaches us alot of things; and right now, hindsight is teaching me that I should have added way more blueberries than the recipe called for!

Anyway, I hope this helped some of you to feel confident in using up some of those freezer blueberries leftover from the summer! Yay for no more greenish-gray muffins! I'll eat to that ;)