Blackberries are in season right now, totally ripe and ready for picking in the pacific northwest. Here in Vancouver you can find them almost everywhere, in the back alley ways of the city or up near the mountains. Last night Andrew and I spontaneously drove to the North Shore once the sun dipped down a bit and it got a little cooler out. I knew the spots to go to since I grew up in that area, so we grabbed some containers and went for it. I didn’t expect to find as many as we did, but we came back with about 4lbs of berries, a few scratched arms and purple fingers.
When we got home I realized we had a stupid amount of berries so I had to figure out what to do with them before they went mushy. We rinsed them a few times because there were spiders and other bugs clinging to them, that’s what you get when you pick wild blackberries! After they were rinsed, they were placed on a baking tray to dry. I froze a few cups, blended and strained a few more cups to make ice cream (blog post for that coming soon) and a few cups went into these blackberry bran muffins.
Blackberry Bran Muffins
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups Wheat Bran
1 cup All Purpose Whole Wheat Flour
1 tsp Baking Soda
1 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp salt
2/3 cup Brown Sugar
1/3 cup Vegetable Oil
1 cup Buttermilk (make your own, see below)
1 Egg
1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract
2 Cups Blackberries
*Don’t have buttermilk? Use whole milk or cream and add a few teaspoons of lemon juice, let it sit for 5-10 minutes before using.
Directions:
Preheat oven to 375° F
In a large bowl, combine bran and buttermilk, let it sit for 5 minutes.
Stir in vegetable oil, brown sugar, egg and vanilla.
In another bowl, mix together flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt.
Add that mixture to the bran mixture and stir until just combined.
Gently fold in 2 cups of blackberries, don’t over mix at this point, you don’t want to have purple muffins, the berries should still be somewhat whole.
Spoon into a greased or lined muffin tray.
Bake for 15-20 minutes.
Makes 12 muffins.
