Red, White & Blue Muffins {Muffin Monday}

Roasted beets and strawberry jam provide the red, while white chocolate chips and blueberries round out the trio for a festively-colored and tasty snack

It always bugs me, as someone who thinks local produce tastes better than stuff trucked in from Off, to see Red, White and Blue recipes using fresh strawberries alongside fresh raspberries and fresh blueberries.  Why?  Wherever I've lived, those berries are not simultaneously in season.  Late spring is the time of the strawberry, and the raspberries and blueberries come along later in Summer.  If I'm going to combine berries, I'll need to use some that are put up (by freezing or by jammin') so that I can get the best flavor.

Beets are one of the vegetables that we don't devour within days of getting them in the farm share [beet greens, however, I adore and gobble up ASAP]. Beets are long-storing, though, and freeze beautifully after roasting, so in the winter I'll often grab a bag of roasted beets out to thaw and then decide what to do with them. 

Adding roasted beets to muffin batter makes a naturally vibrant result [even in savory form]. I wanted to make a colorful muffin so a beet base seemed like a good way to start. Strawberry jam for summer flavor, plus blueberries and white chocolate chips, make this muffin on the sweet side for my baking--but with only ¼ cup sugar it's still a snack I'm jiggy with feeding my kids.

For other recipes using beets, please see my Beet Recipes Collection. For other recipes using blueberries, please see my Blueberry Recipes Collection. These collections are part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. After typing so much to give you A Peek into My Process I'm going to jump right to the recipe.

partial view of ingredients--just the special ones

untouched photo--this is a naturally crazy color indeed

Red, White & Blue Muffins

½ cup roasted beets, mashed with a potato masher

¼ cup strawberry jam

¼ cup vegetable oil

¼ cup granulated sugar

½ cup milk

1 egg

1⅔ cups unbleached all purpose flour (about 7 ounces)

½ teaspoon salt (I use kosher)

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ cup frozen blueberries

¼ cup white chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.  Spray a 12 hole regular muffin tin with oil spray or line with paper liners. In a large bowl [and using a whisk for best results] combine beets, jam, oil, sugar, milk and egg.  Toss the whisk in the sink, you're done with it.  Dump dry ingredients (flour through baking powder) on top of wet mixture.  Stir until nearly combined, then fold in blueberries and chocolate chips. Scoop** into prepared pan.  Bake for 18 minutes, then cool in pan 5 minutes before removing from pan and cooling on a rack.  Serve warm or room temperature.

**My scoop holds 3 Tablespoons (1 ½ ounces) by volume, though the muffin batter is mounded in the scoop so I'm pretty sure I'm putting a good 3 ½ Tablespoons into each muffin well.  The muffin wells in my regular muffin pans each hold 3 ounces by volume.

I'll close with a photo tip.  With bright summer sun lightening up my kitchen for more hours in the day, I'm finding I need to use a diffuser (lace curtain, thin white sheet, or the official diffuser that's lurking naked under my reflector).  Here's the difference in photos with and without a diffuser (sunlight streaming in from the window to the left):

This post is shared on Tasty Tuesdays, What's Cookin' Wednesday, Fiesta Friday, Clever Chicks Blog Hop