Taste: Cranberry walnut muffins are perfect for Thanksgiving breakfast

Thanksgiving dinner is a giant cooking marathon of all sorts of goodies, some of which only show up on the table a few times a year.

Breakfast on Thanksgiving morning often gets overlooked. Eating is necessary to fuel all that good cooking, but making a big breakfast isn’t ideal for the person eating or cooking.

No one wants to go into Thanksgiving dinner with a full stomach.

Which is why I love muffins.

Back in my grad school days, I would occasionally stop at this great little coffee shop called The Common Cup, located on Chicago’s far northside, and grab some hot bean water and a cranberry walnut muffin.

These muffins were delicious, but not too sweet, not too dry and not too greasy. I loved them.

It’s been more than a decade, but I just couldn’t forget these muffins. I’ve never found a recipe that matched.

So I emailed the coffee shop, asking if they might still use that muffin recipe and if they’d be willing to share it.

Audrey, the manager, wrote back and said that they don’t use that recipe any more, but it was just a basic muffin mix from US Foods to which they added whole cranberries and walnuts.

So, I searched “basic muffin mix us foods” on Pinterest. That led me to this simple muffin mix from “Taste of Home,” which is very customizable.

The recipe even had instructions for cranberry-pecan muffins. Swap pecans for walnuts, and there’s no guesswork with the mix-ins.

There was no way to know if this recipe was the ticket until they were baked. And of course, I had a few hiccups along the way.

The recipe called for a cup of 2% milk. I read that as two cups of milk and wondered why my initial batter was so thin.

The only way to fix the mistake was to make a double batch, so I grabbed my big mixing bowl and measured out another set of dry ingredients and added another egg and melted another stick of butter.

The end result is a familiar flavor. If these aren’t exactly what I got at The Common Cup more than a decade ago, they’re close, and enough time has passed that I can’t make an accurate comparison anyway.

The cranberries add a pop of bright tartness, cinnamon and nutmeg add warmth and walnuts add crunch. They don’t crumble apart but aren’t too soft.

Whole cranberries are easy to find in grocery stores right now, making these muffins seasonal in the best way.

Cranberry walnut muffins

Ingredients

• 2 cups all-purpose flour.
• 3/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons sugar.
• 2¼ teaspoons baking powder.
• 1/2 teaspoon salt.
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon.
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg.
• 1 cup whole fresh cranberries, roughly chopped.
• ½ cup chopped walnuts.
• 1 egg.
• 1 cup milk.
• ½ cup butter, melted.

Instructions

• Preheat the oven to 400.
• In a large mixing bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg. Mix in cranberries and walnuts.
• In a medium mixing bowl, add egg, milk and melted butter, whisk together until combined.
• Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix until just combined.
• Scoop out into a lined muffin tin and bake for 18 to 21 minutes, until golden brown on top. Recipe yields about 18 regular-sized muffins.

Recipe adapted from “Taste of Home” and The Common Cup.