Everyone has a favorite blueberry muffin recipe. This is mine. It's funny. As a fan of sturdy breakfast foods, I'm usually partial to bigger, denser muffins that are more reminiscent of scones. But for blueberry muffins I always come back to this one. Soft and pillowy, it's almost cupcake-like, the opposite of what I usually look for in a muffins. But I guess I'm just partial to the nostalgia behind them.

For those of you not from the Boston area, Jordan Marsh was a department store that sat right smack in the middle of the city's downtown from just after WWII to the 1990s. On ordinary weekends, it was filled with city and suburban moms dragging their kids (including yours truly) through the sale racks. I don't think there was a single weekend when I wasn't there with my mom or aunt, browsing through a maze of women's sweaters and blouses and scarves.

But even then there was something refined about it. Jordan Marsh was from the era of older department stores, when they still wrapped your purchases in pretty white boxes emblazoned with the store's name in a thin elegant font. Yeah, I played with those boxes at home, little 6-year-old me pretending I was a refined lady out on the town shopping for refined things. And later used them to store my Barbie clothes.