About six years ago, I rounded up my ten favorite recipes in each category that I have here on Brown Eyed Baker. Needless to say, I’ve made MANY more recipes since then! Over the last few years, I’ve periodically updated the lists so that they are always current with my favorites. In the depths of winter, I love keeping a stash of my favorite muffins in the freezer, so I thought now would be a good time to brush up this list for you!
APPLE MUFFINS WITH CINNAMON-SUGAR TOPPING:
These apple-cinnamon muffins are packed with huge apple flavor thanks to apple cider and chopped, cooked apples, with a fabulous cinnamon-sugar crunch on top. You’ll want to make an extra batch or two to keep in the freezer Aside from the robust apple flavor, the topping on these muffins is absolutely TO DIE FOR… a combination of granulated and brown sugar, along with cinnamon – it’s a wonderfully sweet, crunchy coating and will make you want to save the top for last (at least, I did!). Whether you go apple picking at a local orchard or just grab your favorites from the grocery store, these apple-cinnamon muffins NEED to go on your fall baking list. They’re not as quick to come together as most, but they are well worth every single second of prep time. We are obsessed with them!
HOW TO MAKE THEM FROM SCRATCH?
This recipe is a little bit of an exception to quick one-bowl muffin recipes since you cook the apples down with some butter and brown sugar first, but it is 100% worth the extra time. This is how we make them:
- Cook the apples with butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon until the moisture has evaporated. Set aside to cool.
- Prep the pan.
- Whisk together the dry ingredients.
- Whisk the wet ingredients.
- Add the apple cider, yogurt, and vanilla to the wet ingredients.
- Fold the wet ingredients and cooked apples with the dry ingredients.
- Divide between the muffin cups.
- Sprinkle with the cinnamon-sugar topping.
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Bake until golden brown and there are a few moist crumbs on a toothpick.
PREPPING THE APPLES:
The Best Apples to Use:
The types of apples most preferred for baking need to be firm enough to hold their shape during the baking process and not turn to mush. While Granny Smith is a natural first choice, all of these other apples are fantastic (and delicious!) substitutes:
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Honeycrisp
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Jonagold
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Golden Delicious
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Pink Lady
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Braeburn
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Cortland
Chopped vs shredded:
Cooking down chopped apples helps remove the excess moisture that would otherwise seep out if you were to stir uncooked apples into the batter, which would create dense and mushy muffins. We don’t want those! If you prefer the texture of shredded apples throughout the muffins, I would recommend shredding on the large holes of a box grater and then cooking as directed in the recipe below, but you will not need to cook the shredded apples as long as the chopped apples.
BANANA MUFFINS:
I don’t eat muffins for breakfast very often, but when I do, I gravitate to either banana or blueberry varieties. No doubt a big part of that is that they both tend to have a dessert-like consistency and flavor to them. If I’m going to have something sweet for breakfast, I’m going to go all-in! I’ve been making these easy banana muffins for ages now and I’ve yet to find another recipe that I like better. These turn out fluffy, moist and tasting just like banana bread… a breakfast win, for sure. I love that this recipe makes more than the standard 12 muffins because they freeze wonderfully. I’ll typically leave a handful of muffins out for a few days’ worth of breakfasts, then freeze the remaining ones. After a quick zap in the microwave, they’re perfect. These easy Banana Muffins are the best you’ll ever eat!
INGREDIENTS: -
cups all-purpose flour
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teaspoon baking soda
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teaspoon salt
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½ teaspoon baking powder
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cups granulated sugar
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cup vegetable oil
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eggs
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tablespoon vanilla extract
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ripe bananas (peeled and coarsely mashed)
DIRECTIONS:
- Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Line two standard-size muffin tins with paper liners.
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt and baking powder in a medium bowl to blend; set aside.
- In a large bowl, whisk together the sugar, oil, eggs and vanilla until completely combined. Gently stir in the banana.
- Add the dry ingredients to the banana mixture and, using a rubber spatula, fold the batter together until just blended.
- Fill the prepared muffin cups about two-thirds full. Bake the muffins until the tops are golden brown and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean, about 25 minutes. Transfer the muffins to a rack and cool slightly before removing and serving. The muffins can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 4 days, or frozen in a freezer-safe container for up to 1 month.
BERRYLICIOUS BLUEBERRY MUFFINS:
These blueberry muffins are loaded with fresh blueberries, have a fresh blueberry jam swirl throughout and are topped with sugar for a crunchy bite! I’m not a huge breakfast person; in fact, I spent the majority of my high school and college years skipping breakfast altogether. While I end up too famished nowadays to do that routinely, I’m still not big on spending a large amount of time preparing breakfast. As a result, I often grab a bowl of cereal, a rice cake with Sun butter, or something equally quick. However, if I’m ever out and about and get the opportunity to grab breakfast from a bakery, then it’s blueberry muffins all day, everyday. I rarely make muffins to keep on hand at home, but since making these blueberry muffins, I’m convinced that there needs to be a constant stash in my freezer for emergency situations (i.e. Joseph gets up at 5:45am and I just need something in my belly!). Not only are these muffins loaded with plump, fresh blueberries, but you taken even more blueberries and cook them down into a thick jam and swirl it into the center of the muffins. You’ll notice I did a fairly poor job at getting the swirl INTO the muffins. I dolloped it on top and it was difficult to really get it down into the batter. I would recommend taking the back of the your measuring spoon and pushing into the middle of the muffin to make a little well and then drop the cooked blueberries in there. That’s my plan going forward. Regardless of this misstep, these are the most AMAZING blueberry muffins – so many bursts of flavor and the sugar coating gives it a wonderful crunch with every single bite. This is absolutely my go-to blueberry muffin recipe going forward and I plan to keep my freezer stocked!
CHOCOLATE CHIP MUFFINS:
I’m definitely a muffin gal, but had forgotten about how much I loved them until January rolled around and I was sitting in a hospital room. The morning after having Joseph, my husband and I were filling out the breakfast form and he checked off blueberry muffin on his order. I thought that sounded good and added it to my order, as well. The blueberry muffin that arrived definitely came from a package, but my goodness, it totally hit the spot that morning. It could have been due to the fact that it was the first thing I had eaten in a day and a half that wasn’t ice chips, but it made me remember how much I absolutely love a good muffin. These muffins are incredibly quick and easy to make, taking only 10 minutes from the time you start until they’re in the oven baking away. They bake up soft and tender, not too crumbly, and with a bit of a crunch from the sugar topping. If you love a sweet start to your mornings, these muffins will absolutely fit the bill.
CORNBREAD MUFFINS:
This past Sunday, we were a super small crowd for Sunday dinner – just myself, my husband and my father-in-law (and Joseph, of course!) – and the weather had been downright frigid. We saw snowflakes on Saturday… snowflakes ! When the weather starts to get blustery, I crave warm bowls of food, like soups, stews and chili. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend a cold Sunday afternoon watching football than with a bowl of chili, so on the menu it went! Aside from shredded cheddar cheese and Fritos, I consider cornbread a near necessity when eating chili. I need SOMETHING to sop up all of that delicious leftover chili sauce in the bottom of the bowl! These corn muffins are basically the corniest of corn muffins out there! If you’ve ever made cornbread, you know that you typically use much more flour than cornmeal, but in these muffins, the ratio is reversed. I balked at it at first because I thought that they could be a little dry and dense, but thanks to the addition of things like milk, melted butter and sour cream, the muffins are wonderfully moist and full of flavor.
HONEY MUFFINS:
I’m sure I’m not alone on this, but I feel like you absolutely, positively cannot serve a holiday meal without an abundance of rolls… or biscuits… or whatever your carb of choice happens to be. I need them slathered with butter and prefer them to be soft, yet sturdy enough to soak up pools of gravy and maybe a little stuffing or vegetable casserole, as well. Obviously, I take my holiday bread consumption very, very seriously. These honey muffins are the perfect hybrid of roll and muffin and thus, can be served in a number of different ways. They can be put out for a brunch spread or included next to the turkey, gravy and fixings as a replacement (or sidekick) for traditional rolls. They’re soft yet dense and slightly sweetened, which makes them perfect for copious amounts of butter. Or you could eat them for breakfast, too; they would be equally as great alongside some eggs and bacon or sausage.
MORNING GLORY MUFFINS:
However, making a batch of these muffins and then freezing them for easy, delicious breakfasts is a phenomenal decision. The flour mixture of these muffins is augmented with ground walnuts and ground toasted coconut, as well as cinnamon, which results in some mind-blowing flavor. In addition to that, the batter contains shredded carrots, grated apple, crushed pineapple, dried pineapple, and golden raisins. So basically, every imaginable fantastic add-in you could dream of is in these muffins. If you’ve ever wondered how morning glory muffins got their name, a little history lesson… they were developed by Chef Pam McKinstry for her restaurant, Morning Glory , on Nantucket Island. The recipe was first published in Gourmet magazine in 1981, and in 1991 it was chosen as one of the magazine’s 25 favorite recipes from the past 50 years.
PUMPKIN AND CREAM CHEESE MUFFINS WITH PECAN STREUSEL:
Few things go together as well as pumpkin and cream cheese. Sure there’s peanut butter and jelly, as well as peanut butter and chocolate, but warm and spicy pumpkin baked goods paired with sweet cream cheese is a match made in fall-baking heaven. Add to these muffins a pecan streusel topping and you will be hard pressed to find a better breakfast treat once the weather starts to cool down. These pumpkin-cream cheese muffins have become one of my very favorite fall breakfast items; they taste like part muffin, part cupcake, part coffee cake. These muffins use a neat little trick to make sure that there is a nice little pocket of cream cheese in the middle and that it doesn’t float or spread out inside the muffins. The cream cheese filling mixture is prepared, shaped into a log and frozen for a couple of hours. When you’re ready to make the muffins, you put a little bit of batter in the muffin cups, then cut the log into even pieces and add a piece of frozen cream cheese filling, then add the remainder of the batter to the muffin cups.
TRIPLE CHOCOLATE MUFFINS:
I had a version of triple chocolate muffins on the site since 2010 and while they were okay, they sometimes turned out dry and the chocolate flavor was a little underwhelming, so I set out to create a new, improved version and HERE THEY ARE! If you love chocolate, you are going to go bananas over these muffins. They are loaded with chocolate flavor thanks to melted chocolate, cocoa powder, AND chocolate chips, and have a moist, dense texture. Mornings just got a whole lot better!
HOW TO MAKE CHOCOLATE MUFFINS FROM SCRATCH?
These muffins are incredibly easy to make, done in quick bread fashion as are most muffins. With just a bowl or two and a whisk, they come together quickly so you can eat them in no time!
Here’s how we make them: - Preheat oven and line a muffin tin with liners or spray with non-stick cooking spray.
- Whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt.
- Melt the chocolate and butter together until smooth.
- Whisk the sugar, sour cream, vanilla, and eggs into the melted chocolate mixture.
- Fold the dry ingredients into the chocolate mixture.
- Add the chocolate chips and fold to combine. Be sure to mix gently to ensure the muffins are not dry and tough.
- Divide the batter between the muffin cups.
- Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with moist crumbs attached.
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