I was looking around my usual spot for finding recipes online (Epicurious) and came across this recipe for what is, essentially, a basic muffin base that you can add whatever your heart desires to make delicious and crowd pleasing muffins. Today, my muffins feature Crasins and chocolate chips.

Ladies Choice Muffins (a.k.a. Mix-in Muffins)
From Epicurious.com

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

For the muffins pictured here I added:

• 2/3 cup crasins (Made by Ocean Spray, like rasins but made out of cranberries.)
  
• 1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
  

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 400°F. and butter twelve 1/3-cup muffin cups.
• Into a bowl sift together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
• Melt butter.
• In a small bowl whisk together with sour cream, egg, and vanilla.
• Stir in butter mixture (and additional ingredients; see note, above) into flour mixture until just combined.
• Divide batter among muffin cups and bake in middle of oven until golden and a tester comes out clean, about 20 minutes.

Makes 12 muffins.

About this recipe: This makes a very yummy base for what ever you can think of to add to muffins. I found the instructions a little odd and ended up mixing the sour cream, egg, vanilla, and melted butter together in the small bowl and adding that mixture to the sifted flour, sugar, baking powder and salt mixture. I mixed my crasins and chocolate chips into the flour first and then everything together. Some of my crasins had a little flour in their centers so maybe adding your goodies to the wet ingredients would be best.

Since I live in a very dry place, I always find when using sour cream (specifically I used light sour cream) that my mixture ends up a little dry, so I added maybe a teaspoon or two of half & half just to get everything wet. Your dough should be very thick, more like a biscuit dough than a cake batter.

Save yourself some time and the tragedy that is stuck muffins and use muffin liners. These are available at the grocery store but are usually hidden somewhere up high in the baking aisle. I always have to ask. Apparently it's a popular thing to ask for since the man who helped me knew exactly where they were having shown many shoppers where they were at.

You should have plenty of batter to fill the 12 muffin cups to the top of the tray. I was worried these would rise out of control, but as you can see it was a gentle rise that held very well, so don't worry about over filling the cups.

The result? Just delicious! The base is not terribly sweet so you should add at least one ingredient that has some sweetness. My combo: crasins and chocolate chips, was just right. I will make this again and again and challenge myself to conjure up weird and wonderful additions. I've already got plans: crasins/dried appricots and dried cherries/chocolate chips.