Vegan Blueberry Muffins with Orange & Almond Streusel

Fresh, zesty, and perfectly moist, these vegan blueberry muffins are ready for spring! This fun twist on a classic is a personal favorite of mine, and a must try for everyone.

Welcome to Alder Spirit’s first official blog post! (Hooray!) I’m so happy you’re here, and I am beyond thankful for your support. These vegan blueberry muffins are a great way to start this blog off with a bang! They honestly couldn’t have turned out any better. The aroma of the orange is so bright and shiny like the first rays of spring sunshine, and the blueberries burst with flavor.

I like to top these muffins with some crumbly almond struesel, but you can omit it if you’d like. If you haven’t smelled almond extract before, be sure to give it a try! It’s wonderful.

Note that if you do want to use the almond streusel, it’s best to prep it ahead of time. It’ll need to be nice a cool when you top it onto the muffins before baking.

Tips for Vegan Blueberry Muffins

There are some tiny helpful tidbits I’d like to start you off with before you dive deep into this muffin recipe. They make a world of a difference, and if you read any part of this blog post let it be this!

1. It’s super important to not over mix the batter. Stop mixing as soon as the batter begins to come together. If you whisk this batter to oblivion trying to get it perfectly smooth, you are unknowingly over working the gluten in the flour and basically asking for stiff gummy muffins.
2. When making the struesel, avoid directly using your hands to mix with. Your hands are wayyy hotter than you think they are, and if you want to keep the streusel nice and crumbly vs. a globby, gummy mess then you must keep the butter cold. Vegan butter is already softer than regular butter, so you must be extra careful of this. I recommend using a pastry cutter to add in the small cubes of chilled butter to the dry ingredients until you achieve the perfect pea size crumble.
3. Do not delay in getting the muffins into the oven once the batter is mixed. As soon as you combine the wet and dry ingredients, you’ve activated the baking soda and started the rising process. This is why old batter, be it cake, muffins, whatever, just doesn’t get the same lift as freshly mixed batter.

Setting up for muffin success

First, you want to prep your oven and pan. I use a 12 cup non-stick muffin pan for these, and lined them with the large sized muffin liners from If You Care. You don’t need to spray the pan with any non stick spray since these amazing liners alone will do the trick. They are unbleached, chemical free, and 100% cruelty free.

Preheat your oven to 375° with the convection fan turned on if you have one. This will help with air circulation in your oven to ensure even baking.

Next, I mix my together my plant milk and vinegar so it can start to clabber. Set it aside to wait while we work on the rest of the batter. We’re essentially making a vegan buttermilk here, it needs time to work it’s magic.

gently mix the muffins

Now you will want to prep your dry ingredients. Combine your flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda in a medium bowl with a whisk. We’ll use this whisk for the rest of the mixing process, but don’t get too whisk happy and go ham. Remember my tip from earlier, and please be gentle and tender to your sweet batter. (It will reward you later)

Grab a large mixing bowl and add in your butter. If you haven’t already melted it, pop the whole bowl (if it fits) into your microwave and melt on high for about 30 seconds. Its okay if it’s not entirely melted, the small lumps will melt as we mix.

Add the white sugar, brown sugar, vanilla extract, almond extract, and orange zest to the melted butter and beat with the whisk for about 1-2 minutes. (Okay, this is the only part where you can go a little ham with the whisk. We want those sugars and fats to bind up nicely!) See the photo above for the completed sugar mixture.

Here is the part where over mixing is to be avoided. We’re going to add the dry and wet ingredients to our sugar mixture in an alternating pattern.

Start and end with the dry ingredients. This usually pans out to be about 3 dry additions with 2 wet additions in between. Add the next addition just before the current one is starting to look completely mixed. For example, I will add the next wet addition at the point where there are still a few floury bits remaining in the batter from the previous dry addition. You can see the photo above for the completed batter after everything is combined

Wash your berries in the sink if you haven’t already and pat them dry. Fold these into the batter gently using a rubber spatula and Voila! You’re orange blueberry muffin batter is complete.

yay for yummy blueberry muffins!

Bring your bowl of prepared muffin batter over to the muffin tin and grab a 1/4 measuring cup to scoop with. You’ll want to fill each cup 3/4 full like in the photo below. I find that the 1/4 is the closest to the perfect amount. If you have a set of scoops like these ones definitely use them instead. They’re the best kept secret to anything uniformly consistent in cooking.

After filling all of liners you have on the tray you should have some left over batter for another small round. These make about 15 muffins for me.

You can now top these muffins with the almond streusel and some raw sugar for added texture. Place them in the oven on the center rack to bake for approximately 20-25 minutes total, rotating the pan about 15 minutes in. When done, a toothpick inserted in the center will come out crumbly and moist with no runny batter.

It’s important you don’t open the oven before the first 10-15 minutes. This can let in a burst of cold air that will cause your rising muffins to sink before they’ve reached their full potential.Place on center rack

Allow the muffins to cool in their pan for about 10 minutes before removing them. I like to garnish them with some fresh orange zest to add to the citrus flavor.

Good luck keeping your family from eating the whole batch in one night as mine did. Everyone was impressed by how well the flavors worked together, and how moist the muffins turned out.

Vegan Blueberry muffins from heaven

Please leave me your feedback on how you liked this vegan blueberry muffin in the comments below and any suggestions you may have. I love trying new things, and am more than happy to help with any questions you may have.

Once again, thank you SO much for your love and support on my first Alder Spirit blog post! I hope you stick around for the ride, and I can’t wait to keep wowing your taste buds with more delicious Vegan goodness.

Feel free to reach out anytime to chat. Until next time!

Check out these other vegan blueberry muffin recipes

Here are some other great vegan blueberry muffins from other bloggers in the community. Go show them some love and support too!

My Darling Vegan – The Best Vegan Blueberry Muffins

Blissful Basil – One Bowl vegan Blueberry Muffins

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