She hasn't said so in so many words, but I have a hunch that my editor thinks I should explain why it took me no fewer than seven muffin recipes to stop fussing and find the perfect one to tell you about. Are muffin recipes that hard to come up with? No, not really. Do we perhaps just enjoy eating muffins so much that I looked for excuses to make more? Unfortunately, not that either. Am I really so terribly indecisive? Apparently, yes, but only in what I believed to be the quest for the greater muffin good. Okay, fine, and when I'm choosing earrings.

What led me here was, innocently enough, a basket of boring-looking lemon-poppy seed muffins at a bakery one morning; they got me wondering when poppy seeds would come untethered from lemon's grasp. Poppy seeds are delightful on their own—faintly nutty bordering on fruity—but they also play well with fruit that is richer in favor and texture than lemon. Inspired, I went home and, a short while later, finally pulled a muffin out of the oven I'd change nothing about. Poppy seeds, plums, browned butter, brown sugar, and sour cream form a muffin that's rich with flavor, dense with fruit, and yet restrained enough to still feel like breakfast food. Seven rounds and six months in, I bet somewhere my editor is breathing a sigh of relief.