Baking Bouchon - Recipe 38: Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins

It's been a while since I cracked open the good old Bouchon book.  I've been so busy making other stuff, it's been a bit neglected.  However, my super cool parents came to stay with us for the weekend and I wanted to make something out of the cookbook for them.  My mom is the most supportive person in my life and reads my blog religiously (thanks mom!) so I absolutely had to make her something from the cookbook.

Luckily, I had everything to make these muffins in the house already so I didn't even have to go to the grocery store... Score! 

The ingredients are pretty much what you would expect for lemon poppy seed muffins... flour (cake flour which I'm a big fan of because it gives a lighter texture than all purpose flour), baking powder, salt, eggs, vanilla, butter (which I prefer to oil in muffins because it adds more flavor) lemon juice, lemon rind and poppy seeds.

When I read the instructions on this recipe I was unusually excited with the mixing method.  No whisks, electric mixers or spoons here.  This batter gets mixed up using an immersion blender.  I'm a big fan of my immersion blender!  I pretty much use it any chance I get.  I never thought to mix batter with it before but it makes total sense.  All the ingredients get pretty much emulsified together which is a good thing.  Especially since the butter is melted, the immersion blender keeps it from coagulating (that word makes me gag) and separating from rest of the batter.

The only things that don't get blended are the lemon zest and the poppy seeds which makes sense.  Immersioning poppy seeds would just make the batter weird and brown and blending up the zest would make it bitter.

The batter gets refrigerated overnight which made baking these puppies up in the AM really speedy.

Did you notice that I finally got a jumbo muffin pan?  I figured it was worth it since all the muffins in this cookbook call for it.  Plus, then I can pretend I'm eating only one muffin instead of two regular size muffins.

These beauties baked up perfectly!  They were light and fluffy and oh so lemony!  Using a combination of juice and zest makes them amazingly tart.  I actually didn't have as many poppy seeds that the recipe called for so they were less spotted than they should have been.  However, I'm not sure that poppy seeds even taste like anything so I think they're just for looks.

Mom, Dad, CA and I all enjoyed these muffins and they fueled us up for a big day of touring DC.  I'm so glad I got to share them with the parentals, they deserve the freshest, homemadiest, more delicious muffins in the world.





See how nice I am to visitors?  Now ya'll come over too so I can make you some goodies.

Enjoy!
Julie