It’s hard to deny the dazzle of a good celebrity family duo, especially a famous mother-daughter pair. While they certainly benefited from having a celebrity parent, the allure of Kate Hudson and Goldie Hawn or Tracee Ellis Ross and Diana Ross comes from what both parties bring to the table. These famous daughters don’t just linger in their mother’s fame; they step out and carve their own uniquely personal careers. Like Ruth Handler said in the Barbie movie, “We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back and see how far they’ve come.”
Gwyneth Paltrow and her mom, Blythe Danner, are another dynamic mother-daughter duo. And as unfamiliar as their star-studded lives are to most of us, they do still look out for each other in the ways a non-Hollywood family would. For example, Gwyneth revealed in her cookbook that her mother kept her well-fed during her pregnancy with a quintessential mom bake: blueberry muffins.
“When I was pregnant, I asked my mother to make these for me all the time. They’re just the right balance of tart and sweet,” writes Paltrow in her 2011 cookbook, My Father’s Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness. Here’s what you need to know about this special family recipe.
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What Makes Blythe Danner’s Blueberry Muffins So Special?
Blythe Danner’s blueberry muffin recipe is nothing fancy, but it uses an excellent ratio of key blueberry muffin ingredients to create a muffin that fans online call “light and fluffy and chock full of blueberries.”
One of the keys to the recipe is using melted butter instead of creaming softened butter with sugar. This swap helps create a dense (in the best way) muffin with an impossibly moist crumb and helps prevent excessive gluten development when mixing the batter, because nobody wants a tough muffin. Blythe also uses whole milk to add moisture and to encourage browning as the muffins bake. And because Blythe bakes her blueberry muffins at 375°, the muffin rise up tall and nicely domed with a slightly crisped top.
And then there are the blueberries. Many blueberry muffin recipes call for 1 or 1 1/2 cups of the sweet-tart fruit, but Blythe’s recipe really goes for it with 2 1/2 cups. Even Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen fame was impressed by that. In one of her blueberry muffins posts, Perelman name-checks Danner. “From Blythe Danner, I realized you could put an inordinate amount of berries in each muffin and still have a very good muffin,” she says.
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How to Make Blythe Danner’s Blueberry Muffins
You can get the full recipe for Blythe Danner’s blueberry muffins on the SELF website, but here’s a quick run-down. Pro tip: It’s the perfect thing to make for Mother’s Day.
Start by gathering your ingredients: butter, eggs, whole milk, flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and fresh blueberries.
Preheat the oven to 375°. Whisk the wet ingredients in a bowl and combine the dry ingredients in another bowl. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and then gently fold in the blueberries.
In a muffin pan prepared with paper liners, divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups, then and sprinkle the tops with sugar for a little shine and crunch. (If you want to make things a little more special, sprinkle the muffins with raw sugar.) Bake the muffins until they’re golden brown and a toothpick or knife inserted in the center comes out clean, which should take 25 to 30 minutes.
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