My sister-in-law went berry picking with her daughter and came home with a couple of pints of fresh blackberries the other day.  She didn’t think they’d be able to eat them all, so she offered some to me.  I immediately turned to my cookbooks and bookmarked recipes. Truth be told, I didn’t find a lot of blackberry recipes that looked interesting to me so I turned to one of my tried and true berry muffin recipes and I dumped the blackberries in.   As you can see from the picture, clearly I didn’t dump enough in.  Next time I’ll use many more per muffin.

I have used this recipe in the past to make strawberry muffins and they’re quite delicious.   The recipe makes a muffin that’s slightly on the sweet side, so I thought the blackberries would suit the recipe perfectly because they’re often tart.   The original recipe calls for stirring the chopped strawberries right into the batter.  I was afraid to do that with the blackberries because they’re so fragile, so I cut some of the larger ones in half, and I placed them carefully in the muffin cups.   I started by adding a small amount of batter to the bottom of the wrapper.   I then hand-placed 3 or four blackberries (or halves) onto the batter.   I then put a little more batter into the cup, then topped the muffin with three or four backberries.   The resulting muffins were really delicious.   They were gone within 24 hours.

Fresh Blackberry Muffins
Adapted from My Baking Addiction

1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
4 ounces cream cheese, softened
2 eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 1/2 cups blackberries, rinsed, dried and chopped in half if large

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Grease and flour a 9×5 inch loaf pan (or a muffin tin). With an electric mixer cream butter, sugar and cream cheese until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time. Mix in vanilla.

In separate bowl, mix flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Blend flour mixture with butter mixture just until blended. Add buttermilk and stir until just combined; do not over mix.  Batter mixture will be thick.

Line 24 mini-muffin cups with liners and evenly spoon a little of the batter into the liners.    Carefully place some blackberries on top of the batter.   Fill with remaining batter and place some blackberries on top. Bake for approximately 17-20 minutes. The muffins are done when the tops are golden and a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean.

Yield:  24 mini-muffins