Blueberry Cheesecake French Toast Streusel Muffins

The dogwoods finally bloomed this week. Late this year — usually they're out by mid-April in Lexington, but it's been a cool spring. When I was a kid in Evarts, Daddy used to say you could plant corn when the dogwood leaves were the size of a squirrel's ear. I don't know if that's scientifically accurate but it's the kind of thing that sticks in your head when your daddy says it while standing in a garden on a mountainside at six in the morning before driving to the mines. Earl Hensley didn't talk much, but when he talked, you remembered.

Daddy died in 2008 of black lung. Pneumoconiosis. He was sixty-two. He'd been coughing for years — decades, really — each year worse, until at the end he couldn't walk to the mailbox without stopping to lean on the fence and breathe. The coal dust got into his lungs when he was seventeen and spent the next forty-five years slowly turning them to stone. That's what black lung does — it turns your lungs into something that can't hold air. It's a slow drowning. It takes decades. And the coal companies knew about it and sent men underground anyway because coal is worth more than men, apparently.

I don't mean to get heavy. I started this post thinking about dogwoods and ended up at my daddy's grave, which is how conversations about Appalachia tend to go — you start with something beautiful and end up somewhere that hurts. That's the place. Beauty and hurt, side by side, so close you can't separate them.

Let me talk about ramps. Ramps are wild leeks that grow in the mountains in spring. If you didn't grow up in Appalachia, you might know them as a fancy ingredient that restaurants in New York charge sixteen dollars for. In Harlan County, they're free. You walk into the woods in late April or early May, find a shady hillside with rich soil, and there they are — broad green leaves, a purple stem, a white bulb that looks like a small green onion but smells like garlic married an onion and they had a baby that was raised by a skunk. The smell is extraordinary. You can smell a patch of ramps from fifty feet away. People who eat ramps smell like ramps for days. In Evarts, ramp season was both a culinary event and a social distancing event.

Betty fried ramps in bacon grease with scrambled eggs and served them on toast. That was the standard preparation — simple, fast, powerful. The ramps wilt down like spinach but keep their bite. The bacon grease rounds out the sharp edges. The eggs give it substance. It's a spring breakfast that tells you winter is over and the mountains are waking up.

There aren't many ramps around Lexington. Too flat, too cultivated. But I found some at the farmers market last Saturday — six dollars a bunch, which Betty would find morally offensive — and I fried them with eggs the way she does. The kitchen smelled like Harlan County in May, which is a smell I'd pay any amount of money for. Connie said the house smelled like a wild animal had moved in. She wasn't entirely wrong. But she ate the eggs and admitted they were good, and Clay wrinkled his nose and asked what died, and I told him that what died was his connection to his heritage and he should eat the ramps and resurrect it. He did not eat the ramps. He ate cereal. Fifteen-year-olds are a lost cause.

So the ramps lost to a bowl of Cheerios, and I stood there scrubbing the skillet thinking about what Betty would say — probably nothing kind about a boy who won’t eat what the mountain gives him. But if I’ve learned anything from feeding a teenager, it’s that you meet them where they are. These Blueberry Cheesecake French Toast Streusel Muffins are my countermove: cream cheese, blueberries, a buttery streusel top, the whole thing built on cubed bread soaked in vanilla custard. They’re french toast dressed up in muffin clothes, and Clay ate three of them before school without once asking what died. I’ll call that a win.

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 20 min | Total Time: 30 min | Servings: 12 muffins

Ingredients

4 tablespoons cream cheese
1 teaspoon sugar
2 teaspoons fresh squeezed lemon juice
8 slices sandwich bread
4 large eggs
2 cups skim/low fat milk (or almond milk)
1/4 cup sugar (or a natural granulated sweetener)
1/4 teaspoon salt (optional)
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 medium lemon, juiced (extra, optional)
1 cup fresh blueberries + 1/4 cup extra for the top
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup flour
1/4 cup cold butter

Instructions

Preheat and prep. Preheat your oven to 180C | 350F; line a 12-cup non-stick muffin tray with muffin liners or spray with cooking oil spray; wipe over excess and set aside.
Make the filling. Combine cream cheese, 1 teaspoon sugar and lemon juice in a small bowl; mix to combine.
Cube the bread. Spread cream cheese mixture over 1 side of each slice of bread. Sandwich two slices together at a time and cut each sandwich into 1-inch cubes. (You should end up with 8 cups of cubed bread).
Soak the bread. Whisk the eggs, milk, 1/4 cup of sugar, salt (if using) and vanilla together in a large shallow dish. Add the bread and mix it through the egg wash (using your hands is easier than a spoon), until all bread is thoroughly soaked. Drizzle extra lemon juice over the top (optional), and gently fold through the blueberries. Using a spoon, fill the muffin cups with the french toast mix (about 3 tablespoons per muffin hole). Set aside and make your streusel.
Make the streusel. Combine the sugar and flour in a small bowl; cut in butter using a metal fork until crumbly. Sprinkle over muffins. Top with extra blueberries.
Bake. Bake muffins 20–30 minutes, or until streusel on top has turned golden in colour. Allow the muffins to cool in the pan 5 minutes, or they may fall apart when taken out too soon.
Serve. Serve straight away with maple syrup.

Nutrition (per serving)

Blueberry Cheesecake French Toast Streusel Muffins — Because Sometimes Cereal Wins and You Need a Better Bribe