Old-Fashioned Muffin Recipe

This basic muffin recipe has a neat trick: Instead of giving you instructions for making just one kind of muffin, it acts as a base recipe for making pretty much any kind of muffin you can imagine. We have a few variations here (including bacon muffins!) to get you started, but they’re illustrative of the many other things you can try. You can use the raisin variation, for instance, to make chocolate chip muffins or the fresh blueberry muffin instructions to make a cranberry version. If you want to get even more creative, you can even make chocolate muffins, or a double chocolate version, by adding a bit of vanilla extract and cocoa to the muffin batter before you mix in your chips. (While the recipe calls for buttering the muffin tins, you can opt to use silicone or paper liners instead to dress them up.)

However you flavor them, these quick bread–adjacent treats are delicious. They’re a bit heartier than the tender cupcake-style muffins you usually find in coffee shops these days. These have a dense, moist crumb, and the muffin tops are rounded and pebbly rather than puffy. They’re also really quick and simple to make—particularly since the ingredients are only lightly mixed—so you can easily throw them together for breakfast or brunch and serve with butter and jam or a swipe of cream cheese. If you make them ahead, store at room temperature in an airtight container.

This recipe was excerpted from ‘The Fannie Farmer Cookbook’ by Marion Cunningham. Buy the full book on Amazon.