It's my birthday tomorrow!

I made a-freaking-mazing Whole-Wheat Strawberry Breakfast Muffins yesterday. The recipe calls for fresh strawberries but I didn't feel up for the store especially when I had a huge bag of perfectly good frozen in my freezer! Cutting them frozen also cuts down on the mess, it doesn't get juicy and bleed everywhere.
So....
I preheated my oven to 400 degrees, put muffin papers in my tins and started chopping strawberries. I slit them lengthwise once and then lengthwise again and then cut them across either once or twice until I had about 1 cups worth of chopped berries. I would actually recommend doing an extra half or whole cup or more  because once I got about 2/3rds through my batter I ran out of berries. :(

I set my berries aside and started mixing the rest of the ingredients.
In a small/medium bowl (or in a sifter as I did) combine 1 1/2 C whole wheat flour, 1/2 C all purpose flour, 1 T baking powder, 1/8 t salt.

In a large bowl with an electric mixer combine 2 eggs and 6 T butter (or vegetable oil) until smooth then add to that 1 C sugar and 1 t vanilla. Once that is mixed well, add 1 C of light cream or as I did 2% milk. I would suggest the milk be room temp otherwise it might cause the butter to clump a bit.

Once your we ingredients are combined slowly add your dry ingredients until it's well incorporated. Lose the mixer for a spatula and gently fold in your strawberries.

At this point I was a little unhappy with how few berries I had in there so I took half a dozen more frozen berries and put them in a cup of my magic bullet and added 2T of milk and whipped that up until the berries had broken down fairly well and it was a small strawberry smoothy. I folded that mixture in as well. It gave the muffins this great airy quality and a good strawberry flavor all throughout.

Use a ice cream scoop or a 1/4th measuring cup and spoon your mixture into the muffin cups about 2/3 full. This recipe made 24 muffins for me. You can top with sanding sugar at this point and it would be very pretty, but you don't need it.

20 minutes was all these needed and they came out perfectly baked. Just test with a cake tester before you pull it out to make sure. Let the muffins cool in the tin for about 5 minutes, and then pull out to let cool on a rack for about 20-30. If you peel off the paper while it's still to warm, the strawberries will want to drop out of the muffin.

Some great additions to these muffins would be 1 C of chocolate chips, or 1 browning banana mushed up and mixed in.

These were so delicious, you could easy top these with some butter cream and they would taste like cupcakes, but just as is they're great to grab on the go for a snack or morning meal.