Matthew Woolen is a master pastry chef and has worked in a variety of Seattle restaurants, including gastropub Old Sage, Zhu Dang, and a gluten-free restaurant called Capitol Cider.

Matthew Woolen

We’ve got problems with most blueberry muffins. Sure, you get to eat cake for breakfast, and you get to feel good about it because it’s got fruit in it. But if you’re going to eat cake for breakfast, you might as well be eating the best freaking blueberry cake. Don’t settle for mediocre continental breakfast buffet muffins! Let us introduce you to our ultimate blueberry muffin.Just like our <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/super-apple-pie">super apple pie</a>, this is everything you love about a blueberry muffin but with all the knobs turned to 11. Let’s start with the berries; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oF1Rd5kis4">some people complain that there are never enough berries</a>. We pack blueberries in these muffins in three ways: a bunch of berries mixed into the batter, a healthy dose of freeze-dried and powdered berries in both the batter and the glaze, and some blueberry extract in the batter to really take the berry flavor over the top (malic acid helps accentuate the berry flavor, too!).For the batter itself, we colored a little outside of the muffin lines. Usually, muffin batters are meant to be super quick, slapped-together affairs: You separate your dry and wet ingredients, you mix them, and you have muffins coming out of the oven an hour later. For our ultimate muffin, we cream the fats with sugars and then mix in the eggs and buttermilk and sifted flour in stages to limit gluten development, guaranteeing the muffins bake up as light and fluffy as the best blueberry cake.Except ... we’re not making cake! We’re making muffins, and muffins need big, honking crowns, so we use a two-step baking process: high heat to start for oven spring and to set the outside of the muffin, low heat at the end to limit <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/mastering-the-maillard-reaction">Maillard browning</a> so the flavor’s all about the blueberries and tender, cakey crumb. With a crown so magnificent, though, we wanted to give the “stump” a little boost. We give them the coffee cake treatment and layer in streusel and put it on top—no need to set up <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYkj2yYaGtU">a little muffin top store of your own</a>, since this muffin is interesting from top to bottom.

Ultimate Blueberry Muffins