We love baking with fresh fruit - especially this time of year when longed-for berries and stone fruits are finally coming into season! Since they tend to be heavier than the batter, these fruits sometimes sink during baking and leave you with soggy-bottomed pastries. Here's how to keep that from happening:
Whenever you're adding fresh fruit to muffins, scones, or other quick bread, toss them in a tablespoon or two flour from the recipe's dry ingredients before folding them into the batter. This coating of flour absorbs some of the liquid released by the fruit as it bakes and keeps the fruit from sinking until the crumb has set.
By the way, you can use this trick with any other add-in ingredients going into your baking! Ingredients like nuts, dried fruits, chocolate chips and savory ingredients can also have a tendency to sink during baking, especially if your batter is more liquidy than firm. Tossing them in flour can help prevent this.
Related: Quick Tip: What To Do With Unripe Fruit
(Image: Flickr member j.e.n.n.y. licensed under Creative Commons)
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I love this trick! With blueberries, it also helps them not turn the batter a funky color. I don't find it necessary to toss frozen items in flour; they do just fine straight from the freezer.
http://www.abreadaday.com
great tip, last year blueberries were dirt cheap for a few weeks and i was baking a lot of blueberry lemon bread, twice a week usually. First few loaves were just bread ontop of blueberry mush, good but messy and not pretty. Till i read this tip somewhere. Tossing in the flour helped a lot, for the particular recipe i was using the batter was so light I had to just sprinkle the berries ontop after putting the dough in the pan, they would still sink but not quite make it to the bottom before the dough set, the distribution was pretty good actually.
Ooh, I wonder if this would've prevented the caramels in my Samoa cupcakes from sinking to the bottom....
http://the-cooking-of-joy.blogspot.com/2009/04/samoa-cupcakes-and-cupcake-exchange.html
i'm planning to bake muffins with fresh fruit this week. What a neat tip! I don't bake often so soggy bottomed muffins would have been very off putting...thanks!
does this work with chocolate chips?