Vegan Blueberry Muffins - Perfectly Light & Fluffy Muffin Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How do you make muffins less dense? ›

The recipe, as originally written, produced wonderful muffins but they dried out quickly and tasted overly dense. In the past few years, I've worked to improve it by replacing some of the oil with melted butter, some baking powder with baking soda, and adding sour cream for moisture and lightness.

You can adapt any blueberry muffin recipe to make it egg free. Replace each egg with three tablespoons of mashed bananas, unsweetened apple sauce, or yogurt. You can also stir one tablespoon of cornstarch or ground flaxseeds with three tablespoons of lukewarm water. Use it as an egg in the recipe.

Having eggs, butter, and milk at room temperature helps them form a smooth mixture that traps air and expands when heated in the oven. That expansion makes your muffins fluffy and light.

Over-mixing – If you mix the muffin batter too much it can create a VERY dense muffin with huge pockets of air inside.

Good muffins are meant to be pillow-soft, light, and airy. And believe it or not, the way you mix the batter has a big impact on texture. If you have the impulse to keep mixing, and mixing, and mixing, resist it at all costs. When you overmix the batter, it crushes the air bubbles and ruins the fluffy texture.

To avoid this, mix your batter until just combined. Overfilling the cupcake liners: If you fill your cupcake liners too full, the cupcakes will not have enough room to rise, and they will become dense and heavy. To ensure light and fluffy cupcakes, fill the liners only two-thirds full.

Structure - although oil makes baked goods very moist and longer lasting than butter, for high rising baked goods that need more structure, like muffins, butter is a better choice.

Why are bakery muffins so much better? ›

The best bakery-style crumb muffins start with cake flour

Cake flour is more finely ground and has less protein, which leaves the muffins with a fine, light crumb and soft texture. Using cake flour is an easy way to avoid heavy, dense muffins even if you end up stirring just a bit too much. What is this?

Rest the Muffin Batter

The first, most hands-off way to make your muffins pop (literally) is to let the batter rest. Make the batter, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and let the batter rest at room temperature for about 1 hour. If you're short on time, just 30 minutes can make a difference.

If there isn't enough egg, your batter or dough may not be able to hold its structure or could end up overly dry or dense. On the other hand, if there is too much egg, your baked goods could lose their shape due to excess liquid, or have a rubbery (or even overly cakey) texture depending on the recipe.

What do eggs do in baking? When added to a recipe, eggs take on a few roles. They may be used to add structure, flavor, texture or act as a leavening agent. Interestingly, depending on whether the recipe calls for whole eggs, egg whites and egg yolks also affect what an egg does during baking.

The main reason TO beat an egg before adding it is that the mixture to which you are adding is not going to be sufficiently mixed afterwards to hom*ogenize the egg. That is, if you are adding the egg and then just "stirring gently", that's not going to be enough to beat the egg.

First of all, try cutting back on the leavening. For every cup of flour, you only need 1 teaspoon of baking powder or 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda. Too much leavening actually results in a denser texture because the cake rises and then collapses back onto itself when the gases escape.

She also found that the gluten level in flour greatly affects the density of baked goods. Things that may have influenced the experimenter#s results could have been the consistency of oven temperature, the consistency of the room temperature, and how well the batter was mixed.

Overmixing the batter.

When you overmix the batter, it crushes the air bubbles and ruins the fluffy texture. → Follow this tip: To ensure a batch of light, fluffy muffins, mix the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients until just barely combined, and no more dry flour is visible.

Muffin was underbaked and cell structure wasn't set. When the cell structure doesn't set, the air spaces created by the leavening in the recipe collapses, causing the muffin to sink. Oven temperatures vary over time. To insure the correct temperature each time you bake, always use an oven thermometer.