I read this blog post over at Tea & Cookies a while ago and thought these dandelion muffins look so delicious, I had to try them sometime! The recipe is over at Fat of the Land, which I bookmarked and set aside for later.

Well, later has come! Today was the first day Matt was to go out and finally mow our grass. All the snow melted quite a while ago, but them we had that weird day of snow at the end of April, so we’ve been putting off lawn maintenance just in case. Now that everyone else in the neighborhood is cutting our grass and Rhino is almost getting lost in it’s height, we decided it’s time. Our yard has been overrun with dandelions, so I wanted to take advantage of the weeds before Matt cut them all down.

We all went out with some little baskets to pluck the heads off the dandelions. I’m so thankful I have such a sweet husband to go out and do things like this with me! Rhino was more interested in the budding dandelions than the blooming ones, but he did pick a couple of good ones. Mostly, he just wanted to put things in our baskets.

Matt and I are suffering from springtime allergies lately, so this was a good test of our over-the-counter antihistamine. We did just fine, but I think Rhino was suffering a little bit!

I brought all the dandelion heads inside and rinsed them. We live in a clean, rural area and I’m not too concerned, but it’s good to get all the dirt, bugs, and all that off them. I don’t want to think about it all too much more than that.

The most time-consuming part of making these muffins is separating the tiny, yellow petals from the green parts. The greens are bitter, so we don’t want to eat those. The recipe said to twist the petals from the stem, but that wasn’t working out so well for me. I’d split each blossom in half and use my thumb to sort of scrape/pull the petals out. I collected four cups of yellow dandelion fluff (I only needed three for the recipe, but it seemed like more was better) and called it quits, though I probably could have doubled even that with all the flowers we picked!

I mixed up the flour, baking powder, salt, and petals in a large bowl. Then comes the honey, milk, eggs, and oil. I added a couple extra squirts of honey because I have a sweet tooth! I tripled this recipe because we have so many dandelions. Hopefully they’re good enough to eat or share, because we’ll have a ton of muffins!

I baked 24 muffins at 400 for 25 minutes, then let cool. I cut open a warm muffin to butter it, set a few out on a plate, and couldn’t keep Rhino away from them!

He got his own muffin, which he devoured right away! They aren’t too sweet (unless I add extra honey – yum!) and came out fluffy and tasty. I wouldn’t think that they taste like flowers. They just have a “muffin taste”! We have four dozen of them now and hopefully some of our friends will want to try them out. If not, I’ll have dandelion muffins for breakfast for a couple of weeks!

Maybe we’ll make this a yearly tradition. The first lawn cutting of the spring we go out and pick all the dandelions for some yummy muffins. It will be a little more fun when the boys want to pick the flowers and help out with the baking (and definitely with separating the petals!) I’m finding all sorts of information on the fantastic health benefits of dandelion greens, but nothing specifically about the petals. It doesn’t matter; they’re yummy and there’s got to be something good in them!

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