Midnight Muffin Madness

Tonight, after working all day on just 3 hours of sleep, I came home to bake muffins.  And not just muffins for me and my DH, but muffins for "Other People".  In other words, they had to be edible - and good - and moist.

Great.

My train buddies helped me out, though.  We scoured the internet to find a good base recipe that I could tweak to my east coast taste buds (thank you lady in Iowa) and I think it is a winner.

So here it is:  Triple Berry Midnight Muffins

The wet:  1 1/2 cups whole milk (tastes like cream to my 2% taste buds!), 2 eggs (thank you Farmer Sophie!), 1 cup melted butter (salted - it's what I had), 3/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract (which I forgot until the last second!) and 12 ounces frozen mixed berries (strawberries, blueberries and raspberries)

The dry:  3 cups all-purpose flour, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon cardamon, 1/4 teaspoon ginger, 1 Tablespoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon salt (kosher - natch).

Measure out your dry ingredients and toss them in a bowl - then stir them together with a whisk to get all of the spices distributed in the flour.

Tos in your frozen berries and coat them with the flour mixture.  If you don't do this, the berries will sink to the bottom of the muffin cups and you will have stew topped with muffin mix - and it won't bake evenly.  I had to cut some of the berries up because they were really big - but I didn't find that out until I had already tossed them in the flour.  I just used my kitchen shears and snipped them into smaller bite-sized bits.

In a separate bowl - mix your milk, melted butter, pure vanilla extract and eggs together (and forget to take a picture due to sleep deprivation) then toss the wet mixture into the dry bowl.

Mix this together as fast as possible using as few strokes as possible.  The more you mix, the dryer and tougher your muffins will be - so less is the way to go.  I used about 10 strokes to get it together.  There are a few lumps here and there, but nothing too outrageous, so it's good to go.

Scoop the mixture into lined muffin tins - about 3 ounces per muffin cup.  This fills them up to about 1/4 inch from the top of the cup.  You'll get 24 of them.

Bake at 375-degrees for 20 minutes.  Pull them out, put them on a cooling rack, ransack the house looking for some gingham fabric and a cute basket to deliver them in.  And walk away.

Triple Berry Midnight Muffins - total prep and cooking time 1.5 hours.   Click here for the recipe card.

I hope they're good!  I should probably try one...or two.