Berry Berry Good Blueberry Sour Cream Muffins

Blueberry Sour Cream Muffins

2 cups flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup sour cream at room temperature
1 large egg, beaten
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups blueberries
1/4 cup butter, melted and cooled
Demerara Sugar for topping (optional)

Directions: Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Prepare 12 muffin cups with paper fillers.

In a large bowl stir together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

In another bowl stir together butter, sour cream, egg and vanilla until blended.

Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the wet. Stir until just mixed (batter will be very thick,) then fold in the blueberries. Spoon the batter into tins and sprinkle with Demerara sugar.

Bake 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Remove to rack and let cool at least two minutes before serving.

NOTES:

*Makes twelve muffins

* The batter is incredibly thick. Like bread dough. You'll think you did something wrong. You didn't.

* Normally I would spoon dough into muffin tins only 3/4 full. With this recipe you can heap it up. Mine didn't spill over.

*My oven runs hot, so I thought my cooking time would be 15 minutes. It took the full 20.

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As a child, I would pick berries on my grandmother's farm. The blueberries ran along side the road going into the property, the blackberries and raspberries were further away from the house into the woods, and yes, my cousins and I actually carried pails. Those berries are dicier to pick because they are on thorned shrubs, so it took patience with tiny fingers. I picked strawberries in sandy patches at my other grandmother's garden, and when I was small, my mother had a strawberry mound in the corner of our yard, again, with the sandy soil strawberries love. I liked picking berries. It's meditative and slow.

When I worked on Capitol Hill, they allowed for all sorts of things that I am sure have been nipped in the bud, including certain vendors wandering the hallways selling produce. There was a man who appeared every spring named Ike, and he would bring carts full of strawberry flats for sale. We would all buy up volumes of just picked berries. I ran into him a few years back, selling at one of the Farmer's Markets around town. I wonder if he's still out there?

Two people I went to high school with who are out in another country growing organic blueberries. I think they are really growing marijuana as their cash crop. I knew them both well enough to know the wife is working her ass off, and he's sitting around doing nothing. Your dream is realized, Homecoming Queen.

She did something incredibly stupid once involving nature. A group of us drove way out into Maryland , beyond Frederick I think, to visit some friends who had moved to a farm. Miss Paw Paw Patch wandered off to do her sufi dancing with nature. The kind of girl who would name her child "Sunflower" or some name after a pop group song. I had grown up a city girl, but with a farm girl mother, so I knew my plants and birds and the basic rules of safety around animals, like..."don't go near the bull," or "there are snakes in the hay."

At the end of the afternoon, Paw Paw came back waving a leafy branch, with purple stain all over her forehead. That's the communing part. I said, "Paw Paw? What do you have on your forehead?" and she waved her branch with purple berries at me. I said, "Paw Paw. That is sumac and it's berry is poisonous. You have to go wash that off of your forehead. It can be absorbed into your skin." She looked at me like "Cube...you don't know shit." So I shrugged and let her be. And now I'm sure she's out doing nature dancing around her berry bushes. I only hope she's learned a bit more since that day she was busy smearing poison around.

If you make the muffins? Eat them. If they stain your mouth berry purple? You'll be fine. If you are pregnant? Do not name your child "Blueberry."