I’ve been a little obsessed with lemon muffins lately. If you’ve got lemons, you usually have the rest of the ingredients around to make them and we all love lemon flavored baked good. These cake like muffins have a little bit of crumb topping, but not too much because they also have lemon glaze. You’d think they’d be too sweet with both, but they are just right.
I have mentioned before how much I love my mini muffin pan (link on my Favorite Items). I almost always make mini muffins instead of full size, because they fit so well in school lunches and they make a great little snack/dessert. Let’s be honest, these are basically mini lemon cupcakes just without the frosting. 🙂
These muffins use both lemon zest and juice to give their flavor, and I also add True Lemon (also linked on my Favorites), because it gives such a major boost to the lemon flavor. You can leave it out if you like and just increase the amount of zest, but I highly recommend trying it. I love all the True flavors (lemon, lime, orange and grapefruit) and I add them to my water bottle all the time for a hint of flavor without adding calories, sugar or carbonation.
One thing to note: make sure your eggs and sour cream are room temp when mixing this batter. If they are cold, the melted butter will reharden and not full emulsify into the batter which affects the texture of the muffin.
Lemon Crumb Mini Muffins
Ingredients
For the batter:
- 3 cups AP flour
- 2 cups sugar
- 1/4 + 1/8 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 4 eggs room temp
- 1 cup sour cream room temp 240g
- 1 cup melted butter
- 1 tbsp lemon zest or 3 tbsp if not using true lemon
- 4 packets true lemon
- 2 tbsp lemon juice
Topping:
- 3 tbsp butter cold and cut into small pieces
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup flour
Glaze:
- 1 cup powdered sugar
- 8 packets true lemon
- enough water or lemon juice to make a medium consistency glaze that you can drizzle over if using true lemon you can use water
- 1/2 tsp vanilla
Instructions
For the topping:
- Whisk the flour/sugar until combined. Work in the cold butter with your fingers until you have coarse sand texture. Set aside.
For the muffins:
- Heat oven to 350 and grease and flour your muffin pan, or use bakers joy or muffin liners.
- In a large bowl whisk together the flour, sugar, baking soda and salt well.
- In another bowl, whisk together the eggs, sour cream, butter, lemon zest, juice and true lemon.
- Mix the dry ingredients into the wet until just combined. Fill muffin wells about 3/4 full. Cover each with a little crumb topping and bake about 12 minutes for mini muffins, rotating pan half way through. They are done when a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean or with a few moist crumbs but no raw batter. Allow to cool for 10 minutes then remove from the pan to a rack to glaze.
For the glaze:
- Combine the glaze ingredients in a bowl. Drizzle over the muffins. These muffins freeze really well, just return to room temp or warm slightly before eating.