Small Batch Recipe for Blueberry Muffins

Made with lemon and buttermilk, these small batch blueberry muffins are the lightest and fluffiest ones around! This easy recipe makes just 4 muffins, but you can double or triple the recipe, as needed.

Small batch Blueberry Muffins Recipe

My mom tests my recipes for me, isn’t that sweet of her? So, when my Mom requested a recipe to make small batch blueberry muffins from scratch, I knew I had to oblige. Plus, these moist lemon blueberry muffins are so good, why wouldn’t I want to make them 5 times to make sure they’re perfect?

Over the 10 years I have been running this small batch recipe site, I have developed recipes using a propane oven, a convection cooktop, a standard coil cooktop, and now a gas range. All of these things can cause slight recipe variations, so I appreciate my Mom testing my recipes. Especially testing my no bake blueberry cheesecake recipe lately!

If you’re new to baking, small batch recipes are the best way to start. If you have a recipe failure (which you totally won’t with my recipes!), you’ll waste far less ingredients. Often, people email me and ask about recipe substitutions that will cause a recipe to fail. Since I can’t reply immediately to everyone, I know that confusing baking soda for baking powder or using more egg than called for in a recipe is going to  make it fail. My hope is that you start fresh with a small batch recipe to ensure success. Once you’ve mastered that, feel free to double or triple this recipe, similar to my blueberry cobbler for two.

Tips for making Fresh Blueberry Muffins

1. Sometimes, homemade blueberry muffins made with fresh blueberries have sunken berry syndrome. Have you ever bit into a fruit muffin when all the fruit was at the bottom? If you lightly coat the fresh fruit with flour before stirring it into the batter, it will prevent this.
2. Since we’re making small batch blueberry muffins, I’m using a small muffin pan with only 6 cups. A regular muffin pan will work, but a 6-cup one is more compact and easier to use. Often, toaster ovens come with a small muffin pan that is perfect for this. (Speaking of, have you seen my toaster oven cookbook for two?)
3. We’re making realgar sized muffins today, not jumbo or mini muffins, ok? If you scoop this lemon blueberry muffin batter into mini muffins, please, let us all know in the comment section below how they turned out :)

Best Blueberry Muffin Recipe variations

Buttermilk substitutions:

This recipe for small batch blueberry muffins calls for 1/4 cup of low-fat buttermilk. Buttermilk is acidic, which reacts with the baking powder in this recipe to make the muffins rise to their fluffy, moist glory.

However, if you don’t have buttermilk on hand, you can make it with regular milk! Just take the amount of milk called for in any recipe and scoop out 1/2 a teaspoon to discard. Then, replace that 1/2 teaspoon with lemon juice or vinegar. Stir the mixture together, and let it rest for 5 minutes before using it in a recipe that calls for buttermilk. 

You can use apple cider vinegar or white vinegar. I promise these blueberry muffins won’t taste like vinegar.

Please note that if your recipe calls for 1 cup of buttermilk or more (like my rye bread), I suggest increasing the amount of lemon juice or vinegar to 1 teaspoon per cup.

Can you use frozen blueberries?

If you’re going to use frozen blueberries for this recipe, I recommend the tiny wild blueberries instead of the large ones, or especially instead of ones you frozen yourself at home. This is because frozen fruit releases the excess water as it bakes. If the berries are smaller, they will release less water. 

If you’re going to use frozen, thaw the berries, and drain off the excess liquid. Then, coat the berries in flour and proceed with the recipe as written.

Ingredients

• Flour. Regular, all-purpose flour, one-quarter cup plus one-third cup for the batter. We also need an extra teaspoon for coating the blueberries so that they don’t sink to the bottom.
• Baking Powder. Heaping one-half teaspoon of baking powder.
• Nutmeg. One-eighth teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg. This is entirely optional, but the combination of lemon zest and nutmeg make these blueberry muffins really stand out.
• Salt. One pinch of salt to balance the sweetness. I use fine sea salt.
• Butter. Four tablespoons (1/2 a stick) of unsalted butter, softened to room temperature.
• Sugar. One-third cup granulated white sugar.
• Lemon Zest. Use a microplane to great about 1/4 teaspoon of fresh lemon zest from a washed lemon. You can use a Meyer lemon, if you have it.
• Egg White. Just the egg white from one large egg. Save the egg yolk for another recipe.
• Buttermilk. One-quarter cup low-fat buttermilk. If you don’t have this or can’t find it, use the same amount of regular milk, but add 1/4 teaspoon of vinegar to it.
• Blueberries. One-third cup of fresh blueberries.

How to make Blueberry Muffins from Scratch

I hope you love this recipe for small batch blueberry muffins, and I hope you share it with someone you love. 

Other best muffin recipes:

• Zucchini Muffins with Lemon Glaze
• Gingerbread Muffins
• Chocolate Banana Muffins (a true reader favorite!)
• Small Batch Pumpkin Muffins