Copycat “Baker’s Muffins” from City Bakery

Several years ago, one of my all-time favorite bakeries in New York City abruptly shuttered, and I, like practically every other New Yorker, was devastated. City Bakery was a truly special spot, with exceptional sweets and the most fantastic baked goods. It occupied the most gorgeous space with huge floor-to-ceiling windows, right off of lower Fifth Avenue.

In the early 2000s, my husband and I lived near the bakery and often stopped in on weekends, treating ourselves to brunch or lunch after a long week of work. But when my first son was born and I abandoned my job as a lawyer, sleep deprivation drove me to the bakery each and every morning. In I’d go, infant strapped to my chest in a Baby Bjorn, for a dry, double cappuccino with nonfat milk and the bakery’s signature breakfast item (and my forever favorite): the Baker’s Muffin.

The baker’s muffin was like a single-serve monkey bread, topped with a gigantic crispy crown of additional pull-apart bits and generously finished in powdered sugar (much of which ended up showering the top of my son’s head). It was jumbo in size, not super sweet, and somehow managed to incorporate two completely different textures: a soft, bready, yeasty middle (less cakey than your average muffin) and a sharp, craggily edged lid that shattered just the tiniest bit with every bite.

The inside was studded with walnuts and raisins, but not in an aggressive way, and featured — if memory serves — thin ribbons of cinnamon throughout. Because its pull-apart nature required you to eat it piece by piece, doing so took some time, and if you were smart (which I am) you ate the bottom pieces first and saved the sugar-dusted crown for last.

Despite the fact we moved to Brooklyn a few months after my son was born, we continued to visit the bakery regularly for the next decade and change, always working in a stop whenever we were in Manhattan. Not surprisingly, I ordered the Baker’s Muffin each and every time, as did my husband and my (now) two small boys (although they referred to it as the “bubble” muffin). Truth be told, the fact that I raised children who adored my beloved Baker’s Muffin as much as I did remains one of my proudest achievements as a mother.

When we heard the bakery had closed, we all mourned the loss of the muffin, and for awhile I didn’t dare try to re-create it. When I did finally give it a whirl, I struggled to achieve the textural difference between the top and bottom parts of my muffin. Did City Bakery perhaps use two different doughs?

At one point, I attempted to make a straight-up monkey-bread muffin by cutting yeasted dough into small pieces and rolling each one into a ball, but my muffin looked nothing like the City Bakery version. I then wondered if the muffin was made from baker’s scraps of dough (hence its name), so I remade my muffins by tossing the dough pieces in the melted butter and cinnamon-sugar and constructing them in a more rustic manner. Happily, they looked more like those from the bakery — and tasted great, too.

The muffins I’m sharing here are yeasty, pillowy and soft; full of buttery, cinnamon-sugar-coated bits that are begging to be pulled apart, leaving the top, powdered sugar-dusted ones for last. They’re a bit sweeter and more buttery than the muffins of my memory, but that’s hardly a bad thing, right? Trying my hand at them has honestly made me love them all the more; as I now realize the utter genius of the original baker’s muffin recipe.

At Kitchn, our editors develop and debut brand-new recipes on the site every single week. But at home, we also have our own tried-and-true dishes that we make over and over again — because quite simply? We love them. Kitchn Love Letters is a series that shares our favorite, over-and-over recipes.