Forget Butter — Use This When Making Muffins Instead

Muffins are basically an excuse to eat cupcakes for breakfast, and you have a lot of options to choose from when baking muffins from scratch. You can go for a simple muffin base or make flavored muffins like pumpkin or chocolate, add mix-ins like fruits or nuts, and finish with different toppings, from a cinnamon-sugar dusting to streusel to icings. But besides flavors, you have another choice to make when baking — should you use butter or oil?

Butter has a few boons in muffin-making, primarily when it comes to flavor — it's said to make a richer, more decadent muffin. Essentially, butter makes very buttery muffins but at the cost of a denser texture. If you want fluffy, melt-in-your mouth muffins, oil is the way to go. Oil's pure fattiness gives muffins a softness that butter-based muffins can't achieve. Along the same lines, oil-based muffins feature a superior crumb structure and are moister. Not only are they moister, but they also retain their moisture longer than butter muffins. Which means, if you make your muffins with oil, they'll last longer and won't go stale as quickly as butter muffins. So if you're not planning to eat all the muffins in one sitting and want a few for breakfast over the next few days, oil is your best bet.

If you're looking for other ways to improve your muffins, there are plenty of tips to produce the perfect breakfast treat. First, be careful with how much you mix your batter. Overmixing your batter makes a tighter, tougher muffin, undoing all that softness you get from using oil instead of butter. Using room temperature ingredients also helps you reach that airy texture. And if oil alone doesn't make your muffins moist enough, mayo is the secret ingredient to better-tasting muffins.

If you're making muffins with add-ins, like fruit for some sweet strawberry muffins, make sure to lightly coat the add-ins with flour. Doing so will help stop your extra ingredients from sinking and creating imbalanced muffins (no fruit juice soggy bottoms, thank you!). And if you want fresh muffins in the morning faster, you can make the muffin batter the night before and even store filled muffin tins in the fridge overnight. That way, you can just heat the oven and pop them in the next day.

If you're looking for more recipes beyond simple fruit and chocolate chip muffins, try our warming extra moist banana nut or spiced bran muffins, or you can whip up some fluffy cornbread muffins to serve with a savory dinner. You can even try creating copycats of your favorite store-bought variety, like Costco's famed chocolate muffins.