Dried-Blueberry Muffins

"[Photograph: Donna Currie] The great thing about muffins, compared to bread or buns, is that they're fast. You can decide you want muffins for breakfast, then have them ready in about a half-hour. While we all know I love bread, good bread takes time. Muffins are now. This time, I was craving blueberry muffins, but didn't have fresh or frozen blueberries. What I did have was dried blueberries. Even better, they were the tiny wild Maine blueberries. If you don't have any dried blueberries, throw in whatever dried fruit you have. I didn't want to overwhelm the muffins with blueberries. I wanted muffins with blueberries, not blueberries surrounded by muffin. This recipe results in a very tender cake-like muffin (even though I used white whole wheat flour, which can sometime result in a denser product). You can use all white flour for this recipe, or half white and half whole-wheat. You can even use something other than water to hydrate your blueberries. To fancy it up, I made them in these fun shapes instead of plain muffin tins. If you're making these in regular tins, a bit of sugar sprinkled on top before baking would add some glitter and crunch as well. About the author: Donna Currie has been cooking for fun and writing for pay since the days when typewritten articles traveled by snail mail. When she combined those talents in a food column for a newspaper in her area, she realized that writing about food is almost as much fun as eating. You can find her on her blog, Cookistry or follow her on Twitter at @dbcurrie or @cookistry...."