With a Chocolate Chunk Sour Cherry Variation

My father-in-law recently passed away. My mother-in-law proceeded him in 2021. With both of them now passed, my husband and his siblings are in the midst of settling the estate, cleaning out the house, and selling most of it. Among other things, I inherited a freezer full of frozen sour cherries. There were gallons and gallons of them going back to 2019. Gary had a sour cherry tree in his yard and dutifully collected, pitted, and froze as much of the harvest as he could manage. But, since Cheryl had died earlier, he was not able to keep up on using them in baked goods. Heaven knows what he planned to do with them all, but they’re all mine now.

I already had a sour cherry pie recipe that works really well. (I’ll post that later.) But I wanted something other than just pie to do with them. So, I searched for a sour cherry muffin recipe on the internet and the first one in the search results (outside of the sponsored results section) was posted by a blogger who looks like she’s a cookbook author. The recipe was highly rated, and I followed the directions dutifully. To the author’s credit, it did make muffins. I’ll give her that. Unfortunately, the muffin part, between the cherries, tasted like nothing so much as plain buttermilk pancakes. Very floury buttermilk pancakes. I mean, it was adequate. But I’m not sure why it was at the top of Google’s search results.

With all those cherries in my freezer, I needed to do better. After looking through some other recipes and trying two test batches of my own version, I have a new recipe. Mine uses butter, almond extract, and a quarter cup of reserved cherry juice to give that batter some flavor. I creamed the butter with the sugar because replacing canola oil with butter can cause baked goods not to rise as well. Creaming softened butter with the sugar helps mitigate that. I also bumped the baking powder way up. (After confirming with other recipes that using more should be okay.) My muffins don’t rise super high, but they aren’t nearly as dense as the original recipe. If you want them even fluffier, you might try adding even more baking powder until you’re happy with them. Be warned, though. I’m not actually sure what happens if one uses too much baking powder.

WHY BUTTERMILK? The acidity activates the baking powder. It’s a chemistry thing. The cherry juice might be enough on its own because it’s also acidic, but I’m not sure. The original recipe used buttermilk and I just stuck with that.

ELECTRIC MIXER: You will need an electric mixer to cream the butter. A simple hand mixer is sufficient. If you want to use a spoon instead of a mixer, you can skip the creaming step, but the muffins will come out denser. You can also substitute an equal amount of canola oil for the butter, which will make the mixture a little easier to stir by hand, and will rise better, but it will contribute less flavor.

VARIATION: If you want to make chocolate chunk sour cherry muffins, replace up to half the cherries with the same amount of semi-sweet chocolate baking chunks. Fold them in along with the cherries.

FANCY: The original recipe called for 2 Tbsp. of sanding sugar as an optional topping sprinkled on after the batter is spooned into the muffin cups and before you put it in the oven. My grocery store does not carry sanding sugar, so I did without. You can try that if you want.

Ingredients

3/4 cups reduced fat buttermilk
1/4 cup reserved cherry juice
1 large egg
1/2 tsp. almond extract
2/3 cup softened, salted butter
1 cup sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
2 cups sour cherries (pitted, thawed, very well-drained)

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350° F.
2. Line standard-sized cupcake/muffin pan with paper or foil liners. Recipe yields 18-20 muffins.
3. Mix wet ingredients (buttermilk, cherry juice, egg, almond extract) in a bowl.
4. Cream butter and sugar in a bowl. Use an electric mixer on medium speed for 1-2 minutes until well combined and sort of fluffy.
5. Combine wet ingredients into creamed butter and sugar mixture.
6. Slowly add remaining dry ingredients (flour and baking powder). Mix on medium speed until well incorporated.
7. Fold in cherries.
8. Spoon batter into muffin cups. Fill 3/4 full.
9. Bake for 30 minutes but check at 25 minutes just to be sure. Muffins will be done when top is beginning to turn golden brown and an inserted toothpick comes out clean of batter.
10. Let rest a few minutes. When cool enough to handle, transfer to a cooling rack.