Love Muffins!

Jeremy's birthday was this past Sunday and one thing I made for him were Love Muffins! He's on a bit of a health kick so I thought muffins for breakfast for a week were a lot better than a breakfast sandwich from Wawa every day!
I originally got the idea when Kimberly from chez sucre chez shared a video on how to make heart shaped cupcakes. He doesn't like sweets (which drives me nuts!) so I thought muffins might work and I mean...love muffins...it just sounded to perfect to not at least try!
Next I needed to decide on what kind of muffins. I searched around on allrecipes.com and found these Cranberry Pecan Muffins. I followed the recipe just as described except I used double the amount of dried cranberries and first soaked them in apple sauce. I have to say they are delish!! The heart shape didn't work as well as I had hoped on all of the muffins but a lot of them looked good. I made sure to put those ones on top. I found these adorable boxes at Joann's. They are so perfect and make the muffins look so professional!

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup sour cream

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup coarsely chopped fresh or frozen cranberries

1/2 cup chopped pecans

TOPPING:

2 tablespoons sugar

1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Here are all the ingredients and you can see my yarn stash in the background and my apron on my sewing dummy....not on me, oops! Oh and also...some gratuitous advertising for my Dad's band 2 Big 2 Fail is back there =)

I was so pleasantly surprised by the foil lid on the sour cream. It's an image of Pfeiffer Beach, Big Sur, California. Isn't that great?! I usually buy generic sour cream but decided to go classy with Daisy for these muffins. Because of this, I will totally be buying this brand all the time now!

Directions:

First I dumped all the cranberrys in a bowl with enough applesauce to coat them all.

Then, in a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add vanilla. Fold in sour cream. Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, nutmeg and salt; stir into creamed mixture just until moistened. Fold in cranberries (apple sauce and all) and pecans. Fill greased or paper-lined muffin cups two-thirds full. Combine topping ingredients; sprinkle over batter. Bake at 400 degrees F for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool for 5 minutes before removing from pans to wire racks.

If you watched the video, then you already know but if not, to get the heart shape you fill the liner 1/3 of the way, place a marble between the muffin liner and the tin and then fill another 1/3.

Like so...

After baking here is what they looked like. Not all of them looked like hearts but it didn't bother me too much. There were enough that did and it's the thought that counts!

I'm sure these would look better if they were cupcakes and I could have used the icing to accentuate the heart shape but whatev...these were cute and tasty!

On a side note, do you blogspot-ers like the new way pictures are put into your blog? Instead of the path it's the actual picture. I thought I liked it at first but after doing this post with so many pictures, it was a real pain in the foot! Dragging the pictures is kind of difficult, especially since I like to write and then post the pictures so I'm all messed up!

Have a wondeful day!