Amazing Birthday Blueberry Muffins

Whew! With a birthday party and Christmas preparations now complete, I feel like we are all taking a deep breath.  Our Christmas day was peaceful and lovely, and I hope yours was too. 

Our oldest recently turned 6 and we asked her if she'd like to plan her special day. From what to have for breakfast, to what activities the family would do, she picked her favorite things. It was both fun and endearing. Her first request was blueberry muffins for breakfast. 

With all the holiday indulgences I wanted to serve a very nutritious muffin, but of course it also had to be delicious and feel special for her special day. Then of course, we are in December, pretty much the opposite side of the year from fresh blueberry season in Northern California. I picked up some frozen organic blueberries. A bit leery of them releasing too much moisture into the batter, I thawed them (just by leaving them out in a bowl on the counter top) and then gently patted them dry with paper towels. 

For extra blueberry-ness, I used a special blueberry infused honey, compliments of Sonoma Harvest. If you don't have this, any good local honey will work.

The second trick to these muffins is ripe bananas--blended well. A while back I made banana crepes (which were incredibly tasty). When you prep the batter for banana crepes, you blend the banana, eggs, flour and milk together with an immersion, or stand blender until the mixture is totally smooth. I have since employed this strategy whenever baking with bananas. I love this technique because you get all of the banana nutrition and natural sweetness, with out those little chunks or brown stringy bits that pop up in your banana baked goods when you just mash with a fork. Now if you're into banana chunks, but all means go for it. But for these muffins the perfectly blended bananas work wonders.

All I have to say, is mission accomplished! These muffins had loads of blueberries, held together by a 100% whole grain, refined sugar free batter. 

A note about the recipes: you probably noticed that I changed the format of my recipe display here. While cooking over the holidays, and usually using an iPad to reference my recipe, it was constantly bugging me that I was scrolling up and down between the ingredients and the method. It leads to either a rather messy iPad, or attempting to scroll with my elbow, which never works well. I came up with this side-by-side orientation in the hopes that you can view all the essential information at tonce. I'd love your feedback on the best way to view recipes, well actually I'd love any feedback at all :-)