Today on Sugar Spun Run, I'll be showing you how to make lemon muffins.
Hey Sugar Spun Bakers, Sam here!
And today, I am so excited to be sharing another carefully tested, well researched,
and perfected recipe.
Today, we are making lemon muffins. This recipe has actually been on my blog for several years now,
but I thought it needed a refresh, a couple small tweaks to
make them absolutely the best lemon muffins,
and I am so happy with how they turned out and I can't wait to share this one you.
Now, the first thing you want to do is get your oven preheating to four hundred
and twenty five degrees Fahrenheit.
Next, you're going to need a large mixing bowl
and you'll want to measure out one and three fourth cups of all purpose flour.
We're going to add three fourth cup of granulated sugar,
two tablespoons of cornstarch,
and I love using cornstarch in
so many of my recipes—it's a great secret ingredient—
and here it helps keep them up and it's nice and super soft,
gives them a really plush tender crumb,
and it helps them nice tall muffin tops, all without drying them out or making them dense.
We'll also be adding two teaspoons of baking powder,
a half teaspoon of baking soda, and a half teaspoon of table salt.
We'll whisk everything together to get it nicely combined,
and we'll set this aside. Now
for today's recipe, you are going to need three tablespoons of lemon zest for flavoring the muffins.
We're also going to need some lemon juice, both for the muffins and for the lemon glaze.
So I have two muffins here
and I have my zester and I'm just going to go ahead
and zest these lemons until I get three tablespoons of fresh lemon zest. Now
when you're resisting the lemons,
one thing I wanna note to you is you don't wanna go too deep.
Now if you go too deep into the lemon, let me see if I can show you an example here.
you're going to get to this papery white layer.
This is called the pith and it's actually very bitter.
It doesn't have that nice sour lemon flavor.
It has a bitter taste that you don't really want in your muffins.
If you go a little bit too low a couple times and get that in with your zest,
that's fine. But you don't wanna get a lot of this,
or your muffins are going to taste bitter rather than have that
nice, lemony, sour flavor that we're looking for.
It's not really a sour muffin, but it does have the appropriate tart flavor.
So here I have three tablespoons, about three tablespoons, of zest.
And I'm also going to need some juice,
so I'm just gonna go ahead and squeeze this lemon. Always zest your lemon and then squeeze it.
Don't try to zest a lemon that you've squeezed
—that's very difficult. Now you only need four tablespoons of juice total.
Looks like I have about that right here, so I'm just going to hold onto that extra lemon,
but I'm only gonna squeeze the one for now. Okay, so I have my zest and my juice.
I'm just gonna set these aside a little bit. And then in a separate mixing bowl,
I'm going to combine my wet ingredients. Now we're starting with eight tablespoons,
or one half cup, of melted, unsalted butter.
We're going to be adding three fourth cup of full-fat sour cream. You could
substitute full-fat, plain Greek yogurt instead.
We're also going to add one large egg.
And then for the actual muffins themselves,
we only need two tablespoons of lemon juice,
so I'm just going to measure that out and add that in as well.
Don't discard the rest of the lemon juice. We'll need it for the glaze.
All right, now we'll add in our lemon zest. And for an extra punch of lemon flavor,
I like to add a half teaspoon of lemon extract.
You can leave this out if you want, but it really does help bring out the lemon flavor of course.
Now we'll whisk together these ingredients until they're well combined.
If your mixture is looking a little bit piecey or it starts to separate or look a little bit curdled,
that's okay. Just do the best you can to get everything nicely combined.
Alright, now grab your dry ingredients from earlier,
and we'll add our butter, lemon zest mixture into that.
And then just use a spatula to gently fold the ingredients together
until they're completely combined.
You don't want to see any flour remaining. You want everything to be well combined.
Now, this is a dry, very thick batter that's totally normal as you can see from mine.
One thing you do not want to do anytime you're making muffins
is you do not want to overwork the batter,
so just use a gentle hand, just fold the ingredients together,
and just keep on doing this until everything is completely combined.
But don't overdo it and certainly don't use an electric mixer.
Alright, now grab yourself a muffin tin and I like to line mine with paper liners.
So today's recipe does make twelve muffins if you'd like,
but one thing I like to do is I like to take all of this batter
and just fill up ten or eleven muffin cups instead.
That way I get super big muffins or muffins with nice, tall muffin tops,
so I'm just going to divide this into eleven cavities instead.
So see that extra batter that could be our last muffin?
I'm just going to divide that among the muffins that seem a little smaller than the rest.
Alright, now we're going to take this over to our four hundered and twenty five degree Fahrenheit
preheated oven, where the muffins are going to need to bake
for eight minutes.
Now after eight minutes has passed, do not open your oven door,
but reduce the oven temperature to three hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit,
and you're going to want to continue to cook the muffins for about another five to seven minutes.
Starting the muffins on a high temperature helps give them really
nice, tall muffin tops, gives them a lot of height,
and then lowering the temperature, lets them cook on the
inside and stay nice and soft without becoming overdone,
so this is one of my favorite techniques when I'm making muffins.
Now when your muffins are finished baking, I recommend using the toothpick test to test that they're
actually finished. Just insert a toothpick into center of your muffin,
and it should come out clean or with a few moist crumbs.
Now I like to let the muffins cool in their tin for about five minutes or so,
and then I like to carefully remove them to a cooling rack cool completely.
While they're cooling, we can go ahead and prepare our lemon glaze.
Now this glaze is super simple. We're just going to combine
one and a fourth cups of powdered sugar with just enough
lemon juice to make the perfect glaze consistency.
I always start by adding one
and a half tablespoons of lemon juice
and this is the lemon juice from earlier, of course, that we saved.
And then we'll just whisk everything together. And you can see this is a little bit too thick still,
so I'm just gonna add a little bit more lemon juice,
until we have a nice consistency. So this makes a nice consistency for drizzling over the muffins.
I'll go ahead and do this with a few of them.
And then if I wanna dip the muffin in the glaze,
this might be a little bit thick. Let's see.
Okay, so my muffin top is actually starting to come off here,
so I'm just gonna thin this a little bit more with just a splash more liquid.
If you're out of lemon juice, you can use a little bit of water,
that'll be fine. And this is a nice, thinner consistency.
So now I'm just going to dip the rest of my muffins in this nice lemon glaze.
And that is how you make these delicious bright and sunny lemon muffins.
I really hope you guys enjoyed today's recipe and if you try this one out,
please leave me a comment and let me know what you think. I always love hearing from you.
Thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
That's good.