Omnomicon

Okay, Recipe Round-Robin Tastebuds . . . did you get Recipe A? Did you just love it? Well, so did everyone else, and I’m so excited to announce the winner of Omnomicon’s very first Recipe Round-Robin: it’s none other than my old pal Lo of Burp! Where Food Happens fame!! Come on down, Lo, you have won your very own copy of The America’s Test Kitchen Family Baking Book.

See? Like that!

I want to thank the several other folks who entered the contest for so generously sharing their recipes. Y’all rock! Everyone had delicious descriptions of each of the recipes involved, so rest assured yours garnered some mad props in some end of the globe.

So what made this recipe so awesome? Here are some of the nice things our Tastebuds had to say:

• Muffin A was hailed as “the best blueberry muffin EVER”.
• A was fluffy, moist and very very tasty.
• This was a difficult, very delicious decision. But Recipe A is the winner in my book (er, stomach?).

And here’s what my test run of Lo’s Blueberry Pecan Muffins with Brown Sugar Topping looked like. We start with buttermilk and oil. It looks pretty cool.

If you don’t have a cup of buttermilk on hand, you can always substitute a cup of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice, or, as I recently found out, 1 cup of yogurt. Now, clearly Lo got it right with the buttermilk, but just in case you forgot to pick up the buttermilk at the grocery store, these are things you are more likely to have already on hand.

There were blueberries, of course.

. . . and a subtle amount of pecans in the batter that is *juuuuuusssttt* enough without overdoing it.

I have to admit that I kind of messed this up just a teensy bit, though not enough to destroy the tastiness of all this (*phew!*). See, I was out of dark brown sugar, and apparently I haven’t quite mastered how to make dark brown sugar out of sugar and molasses, soo . . . my topping was a little too wet (as in, it had too much butter and not enough sugar). And because of that, I ended up with little holes into the top of my muffins. But if you use hard packed brown sugar and did it right, yours should look more like mounds of brown sugar and less like um, well . . . brown gloop on top. Like I said, this is me and NOT the recipe. So make sure yours looks like brown sugar still.

And you know, the brown sugar and pecan topping really makes this extra-special.

But in the end, it’s a blueberry muffin, and aren’t they always just totally delicious?

Lo’s Award-Winning Blueberry Pecan Muffins with Brown Sugar Topping
courtesy of Lo

2 cups flour
1 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp kosher salt
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup oil
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup fresh blueberries

1/2 cup dark brown sugar packed
3 T melted butter *(see NOTE below)
1/4 cup finely chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 375º.

Combine flour, granulated sugar, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, and 1/2 cup pecans in large bowl.

Whisk buttermilk, oil, egg, and vanilla in small bowl. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients; stir just until combined. Gently fold in blueberries. Allow batter for 15 minutes before dividing evenly among paper-lined muffin cups.

Combine melted butter and brown sugar in a small bowl. [Aleta’s NOTE (and the only part of this not word-for-word Lo’s recipe): a lot of people have had a hard time with this crumbly topping like I did (notably, others have had no problem at all), probably from not packing sugar enough. Because brown sugar packing is an inexact process, I recommend reducing the butter 1 tbsp or eliminating altogether to prevent sunken-in tops.] Spoon 2 tsp over each muffin then sprinkle with 1 tsp of the remaining finely chopped pecans.

Bake muffins at 375º for approximately 20 minutes or until a toothpick in the center comes out clean. Cool on a rack for at least 15 minutes before serving.

nutrition summary (for 1 of about 14 muffins, with topping, real egg & all-purpose flour): 310 calories, 1g fiber, 16g fat; 7 weight watchers points

Hey, one last thing: a lot of participants said they enjoyed taste-testing and would do it again. Yay! That means my experiment was successful! That said, what do you think would be a good recipe standard for the next Recipe Round-Robin? I’m looking for the kind of thing that everyone has a recipe for. So far Twitterers have recommended things like macaroni & cheese, meatloaf and shepherd’s pie . . . keep going, what else can you think of? Leave a comment if you know just the thing, and thanks dude!