I am likely the last person in New York City to learn about
Blue Sky Bakery muffins, and it’s all my fault because I wasn’t paying attention. Why would you, really? Most coffee shops don’t sell muffins worth noting. You can only audition so many flavorless, greasy, tight-crumbed, massive metallic-tasting muffins before not even looking in bakery cases when you go in for your morning fix.
Four year-olds, however, are not suspicious — they are insistent. So, one morning over spring break (something you dread when you’re in preschool, live for in high school and college, and I’m sorry to admit, lightly dread again as a parent), when I tried to make the most of our more leisurely mornings with excursions, we got in the terrible habit of splitting one of their fruit-filled bran muffins each morning and by the end of the week, we were so addicted that I had to make them at home.
It’s no surprise that a bakery that takes their muffins as seriously as Park Slope’s Blue Sky does produces such excellent ones. In a video on Serious Eats, founder Erik Goetze notes that “most bakery muffins are made by just going through the motions, either in an industrial factory-type muffin-making operation or whether people are making so many things, they cannot focus on what makes a great muffin,” which he outlines as moist, having a nice peak to it and, ideally, straight from the oven when it’s still crisp and crunchy on top, and when opened, a little curl of steam comes out of it.
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