Cranberry Muffins with Crumb Topping

As you probably know by now, I am totally muffin obsessed.  I eat some kind of muffin pretty much every day for breakfast, unless I have some homemade Pop Tarts in the freezer.  Most of them are based off of one recipe, but now that I’m baking for you, my blog readers, I don’t want you to get bored with the muffins I make.  So I went in search of a few different recipes, and this is one of my favorites.

The reason I stick to variations of one muffin recipe, very loosely adapted from Sunny Anderson’s Sunny Morning Muffins, is that I don’t eat any dairy in the morning for fear it will weigh me down the rest of the day.  No butter and milk laden muffins to start out my day.  Seeing Sunny not rely on butter and only a little milk, allowed me to use my creativity to create a healthy, delicious breakfast.  And while there will be plenty of versions of that muffin posted, I wanted to expand my horizons and yours with something entirely different.

My search led me to a recipe by Grace Parisi from Food and Wine.  The batter itself relies only on canola oil, for which I substituted vegetable, instead of butter.  It also calls for ¾ cup whole milk.  There was no getting around that, so I bought Blue Diamond Original Unsweetened Almond Milk.  It worked perfectly in the muffins, and I don’t even mind drinking a little of it.  Cold, it tastes kind of like a milkshake!  It’s low in calories, has all the nutrients milk does, and is lactose and soy free.  It’s one of my new favorite products.

The topping did call for 6 tablespoons of melted butter, but I substituted 4 of vegetable oil and found it worked amazingly.  The original recipe also used blueberries, but I have a bunch of bags of cranberries in the freezer that I froze around Thanksgiving when they were in season that have been calling my name.  I used a whole 12 ounce bag in the batter, unthawed.  It is very important to not thaw the berries or the muffins will never bake as they will have too much liquid.

The wet ingredients were really liquid, which worried me a little, but the batter came together very nicely.  I made 12 rather large muffins in a regular muffin tin, packing the topping on top of them.  I put Reynolds Wrap under the tin in case of any spill over since the cups were really full.

The end result was better than I ever imagined.  The cake is light, white, and fluffy.  They bake up much softer than the other muffins I make, giving them an almost cakelike texture and taste.  The cranberries add a nice tartness to the muffins without being too assertive.  The tops of the muffins did not brown much at all, and the crumb topping remains crumbly, having a sandy texture with a few larger clumps and a fabulous brown sugar – cinnamon taste.

When thawed in the oven they are perhaps even better, with the same great attributes and just a hint of crunch.  Who doesn’t love a great muffin for breakfast?