The World's Best Cranberry-Blueberry Muffin - Recipe Adapted by Alanna Best [Short Story]
A ghost story about family ties and the snacks that bind us.
Hello!
While I was considering keeping all of my writing exclusive to subscribers only (which is free btw), I came across a Joanne Fluke novel at work—Pink Lemonade Cake Murder—which contained recipes! In addition to the murder! And that reminded me that I, too, used a recipe format to tell an offbeat story.
Since it’s October, please enjoy this short little ghost story with sprinklings of family trauma—plus a recipe I created (and have made) myself.
Some notes: I wrote this back in 2018 for my short story collection Sampler Box, which contains a lot of experimentation with genre, format, etc. I’m not one for writing in first person, so this was a fun exercise in voice.
The World’s Best Cranberry-Blueberry Muffin - Recipe Adapted by Alanna Best
By Erica Kitch
Hello to my fellow foodies, stay-at-home moms, grandmas with wifi, and the culinary world’s Next Big Thing! Welcome to my humble food blog wherein I post a new recipe bi-weekly.
I want to start this story off right by dedicating this recipe not to its original creator—my great-grandmother, Agatha—but to my little sister, Audette Best. Detta, I still miss you.
To understand the depths of this recipe, I feel that it’s best that I tell you, loyal bakers, the full story of its importance in my life.
Now I’ve never talked about my family on my blog before, but perhaps some Maine-based locals recognized my surname and put two-and-two together. Or maybe you’re a true crime blogger who’s been stalking my page for any mention of her name.
Either way, this is the story of the Disappearance of Audette Best and how cranberry-blueberry muffins became intrinsically tied to her existence.
I grew up as the middle child of a family run by a single mother. My mother was Adela Best, a beautiful former pageant queen who had burned out in the pageant circuit before she could achieve any notable level of fame. She raised me, my older brother Clayton, and my baby sister Audette Best, also known as Detta.
Clayton was a college-bound teen when all of this went on. Prior to the disappearance, he was an aloof older brother who was much more interested in amateur horror film-making than playing with my sister and I.
I was ten. I liked to copy Clayton’s aloofness, but my innate introversion and lone-wolf style had others label me as a “Creepy Child.” Well, that creepy child grew into a creepy adult with a food blog and a flair for vintage clothing and car shows.
Detta was six at the time of her disappearance. She was different from Clayton and I, as if she was an entirely different species. She was a cherubic, golden-haired, all-around-perfect little girl and favored none of us. Clayton and I had our mother’s black hair and dark eyes, so Detta was an abnormality.
Parents always have a favorite, and for any adults out there who were not a single child, you know what I mean. They may say they love you all equally, but one child always has the favor. Detta had our mother’s favor, and at the time, I resented my mother for the doting I never received. The second most traumatizing thing I went through was understanding that I was not and never would be my mother’s favorite. I resented her throughout my adulthood until my therapist taught me how to let it roll off my back. I’ve let it go, but I never said I would forgive her for the preferential treatment. Not that any of this matters now.
We all lived together in a small Maine town near the shoreline, in a small red house that faced the ocean and was towered over by a lighthouse. The home remained idyllic in my memory until I revisited it a few weeks back. While house number 463 is still intact, it’s even smaller and darker than I remembered. The cracks in the foundation are more obvious now, and the interior is outdated even by the standards of the time we resided in it.
That house was a hop and a skip away from the ocean, and Detta and I would often walk along the shore and collect pretty rocks that would wash up. We weren’t allowed to swim—it was always far too cold for us, and Detta hadn’t yet learned how to swim.
It was a chilly October day when Detta disappeared. My grandmother Amma was showing us how to make her mother’s signature muffins. I remember them to be moist and crumbly, and when I would bite into it, the blistered cranberries would burst in my mouth, and the blueberries, completely melted by the oven’s heat, would flood and drip from the center. Most distinct was the smell of cinnamon wafting from the crumble on top.
My muffins didn’t turn out quite as pretty as Gramma Amma’s; they were under-filled and lacked the distinct pouf of a muffin top. I had overdone it with the streusel as well in an attempt to fill the negative space in the cupcake wrapper. They were pitiful to look at, but Gramma Amma praised me regardless.
Detta, who had been watching us from underneath the kitchen table, ventured out to sample the goods. She went for mine first and mine only. I watched her devour three flat muffins, smiling and humming as she went.
“Sissy, I love them,” Detta told me. “Can you make them for me again?”
I remember huffing a little and shrugging my shoulders in embarrassment. “If you like them that much, I guess...”
As you all may have surmised, I never got the chance to make good on that half-hearted promise because Detta went missing that very evening. Here’s how it all played out:
Our mother Adela came home from her job at the supermarket down the road. Gramma Amma had fallen asleep in the recliner with her glasses on and the television remote on her lap. The television was off, and the house was dead silent.
Mother came to find us all. Clayton was asleep in his bedroom with the curtains drawn and a pillow tucked tightly around his head. I was washing the dishes Gramma Amma and I had dirtied during our baking lesson. Detta was in her room playing with the new doll Mother had bought her earlier that week—or so we thought.
As she made her rounds, Mother realized Detta wasn’t in her room, nor the living room, kitchen, my room, Clayton’s room, the basement, or the backyard.
The emotions escalated fast; Mother yelled at Gramma Amma to rouse and slapped Clayton awake. She grabbed my hand and dragged the three of us out to the shoreline, screaming Detta’s name.
“Audette! Audette! Detta, baby! Detta, Detta, Detta! Baby!”
We joined her, combing the beach for any sign of her. I never left my mother’s side; her grip on my fingers were too tight, so tight that I remember a pins-and-needles sensation pricking my fingertips.
Eventually we made our way up to the lighthouse, Clayton and Gramma on our heels.
The lighthouse—St. Magdalena—was a tall, gray monolith that towered over the community, and quite a walk away from the house. It didn’t seem likely that Detta could have walked that distance without exhausting herself completely.
But curiously, St. Magdalena’s door was open. Wide open, as if the wind had knocked it in. The lighthouse wasn’t open to the public as it was still in use, and yet there we all gathered.
Sitting at the foot of the stairwell was a single yellow boot left abandoned.
At the time, I didn’t fully comprehend the implications of its abandonment, but I did understand that it was Detta’s, and that was enough to make my blood run cold.
Clayton dashed ahead of our mother, calling Detta’s name as he circled up the stairs. Mother was right behind him, her voice rising to a bird-like shriek that echoed off the walls of the lighthouse.
I looked to Gramma Amma, whose face was red and breath was coming hard. She sat down on the ground, hands gripping her knees as she leaned against the wall. I sat down next to her and leaned against her bony shoulder as we waited.
Mother and Clayton returned without Detta. Clayton’s face was colorless, and Mother’s was broken in a way I’d never seen before.
We returned to the house, and Mother called the police. Two officers arrived and took each of our statements in the kitchen. No one had seen Detta leave, and no one knew where Detta could be.
As far as I can tell, I was the last person to see Detta alive—there, at the kitchen table as she happily ate my ugly muffins.
Search and Rescue boats went out the same evening, but they found no sign of anyone in the water. Search parties gathered as well and would continue to gather and scavenge the community for the next two months. Posters were printed and hung up on every empty space, and Detta’s sweet little face even graced milk cartons. All for naught.
I've been contacted by no less than three true crime podcasters since I've started my recipe blog, and none of them were hungry for anything other than the lurid details of Detta's family life and any speculation I could offer their audience to sink their pseudo-detective teeth into. I have nothing to say to you and no previously overlooked clues to add to your sensationalized stories. Here’s what I know:
Detta went missing and was never found, the police dropped the ball on the investigation as they are wont to do, and my family completely and utterly lost their minds.
It was hard living in such a small coastal community; there was no escaping her image. No escaping the name “Detta Best.” Worst of all, there was no escaping the neighbors.
The Rockmores gossiped about my mother incessantly ever before Detta’s disappearance and soon started a rumor that my mother had done it out of Munchhausen-by-Proxy-esque desire for attention she no longer received. They and the rest of the neighborhood conveniently ignored her whereabouts at the time and soon that became the prevalent theory.
“Dela Best murdered her own child so she could cry on the evening news for a month. Tsk, tsk.”
And then there were my classmates. The kids used to taunt me by referring to her as “Dead Detta.” I would hear the phrase at least twice a day for the next year until my classmates became distracted by a girl in the class over who had a sister overdose.
But it was always, “Dead Detta, Dead Detta, poor Alanna has a ghost for a sister.”
I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t take the thought of my sister being gone, permanently, never to play house with her again, to take bubble baths with her again, to feed her my failed attempts at baking something pretty again. So I decided to seek answers elsewhere.
Our town had a small Fall Festival that made one partially successful attempt at bringing in revenue (before promptly disappearing the following year). It was at the end of the month, two-and-a-half weeks after Detta had disappeared. There was a number of activities to do: a haunted house, an apple-bobbing station, a pumpkin carving competition, rickety fair rides, face painting, you name it.
One particular stall had caught my attention. I remember standing outside of the stall, staring up at a sign that asked, “Are You Getting Into Heaven? Two Questions Reveal The Answer. Free!!!” The kids at school had introduced an existential question to me that, even as an adult, I don’t have an answer to. Where do we go when we’re gone? Perhaps that stall had the answers, I thought.
I walked up and asked the elderly gentleman behind the stall about my sister, but a younger man in his mid-forties answered me instead.
“Are you talking about Audette Best?”
I nodded, and he looked at me scornfully.
“Bastard children and single mothers never get into Heaven, young lady,” the man said with a sneer.
I remember the elderly gentleman beating him over the head with his fist immediately after.
Now comes the time where I disclose to you that Detta was my half-sister. Clayton and I shared a father who, regretfully, passed away in the winter of my second year.
Detta’s father was a complete unknown.
At ten, I wasn’t ignorant as to where babies came from. I had walked in on my mother having sex with another complete unknown—a salt-and-pepper man who then joined our family for a total of two months before walking out.
So, needless to say, I understood what the man was talking about, and it scared me even more.
We were never a particularly religious family; we went to a local church on Easter Sunday and a few other scattered times throughout the year. I understood at that age that there was a place you went to after you died, and the thought of Detta not being there made me wonder just where she ended up, if anywhere. The answer to that question arrived only two nights later.
I can vividly remember that night: I woke up needing to use the little girl’s room and rose from my bed. As I walked through the upstairs hallway, I began to feel as if something was following me. I grabbed the doorknob to the bathroom, bucked up all of my nerve, and whirled around to scowl at whatever was behind. I was a stupidly brave kid, but I never could have prepared to peer into the eyes of my missing sister.
At first, I felt relief. I smiled, albeit briefly, for the first time in weeks, and then I felt anger. I opened my mouth to either laugh, scold her, or cry. I only got out half of her name before I realized something was extremely off about her.
Detta was gray, stone-like, and had wings sprouting from her neck. She wore the same floral dress and brown cardigan I had last seen her in, and she was missing one boot.
My mind quickly worked to rationalize this. I decided immediately that she was a hallucination, a trick of a mind that was weary and grief-stricken, fearful and regretful. I turned away from her and shut the door behind me, but when I opened it again and began my shuffle back to bed, Detta was still there. Still gray, winged, and silent. She opened her mouth, and a silent noise emerged. I felt dizzy and sick, so I squeezed my eyes shut and made a break for it.
I dived underneath my bed covers and did not sleep that night.
That morning, I went down to the kitchen, bleary-eyed and convinced that I had had a terrible nightmare, and was assaulted by a terrible smell. I found the muffins I had made—now nearly a month old, stale, and molded—sitting out on the counter, flies buzzing around them and eating away at their remains. I threw them away and sobbed for the rest of the day.
My second attempt at making the muffins was nearly a year later.
My family was in a different place emotionally. It was generally accepted by the community at this point that Detta was indeed dead and that whoever had done it had gotten away with it. The police had dropped the ball numerous times as the follow-up on phoned-in leads weren’t immediate, resources were put into lesser crimes being committed, and the department overall just wasn’t big enough to accommodate the amount of national attention Detta’s sweet little face had garnered. Such is life.
My mother had quit her job at the grocery store and picked up a job at the post office window where she could occasionally be heard sobbing among the packages. My brother had started attending a community college and was working on a criminal justice degree. As for me, I was just another year older and another grade ahead. I had turned myself into an ice princess and the only sane person in my family. I didn’t mourn Detta anymore because she openly haunted my dreams every night.
That day I made the cranberry-blueberry muffins, I was trying to cheer up my brother. He had come home from his afternoon class weeping in a way I haven’t seen since Detta’s second night gone. I remembered Detta’s smiling face when she first tried the muffins and thought my brother might react the same.
Since then, I had improved my skills. My muffins actually had tops now, and I had figured out the proper amount of streusel to make. I hadn’t touched Gramma Amma’s recipe since that day because I felt it was somehow tarnished by all the bad.
And yet, there I was: a year older and no wiser for it.
The muffins were nearly finished by the time my mother had arrived home and received a strange phone call. It was Clayton’s girlfriend, Laura, who called to tell my mother that Clayton hadn’t been attending classes and instead was playing private eye around town.
Mother snapped, naturally, and a huge argument erupted right there in the kitchen. Clayton knocked the chair he was sitting in over as they screamed at each other. Both claimed that neither understood each other’s state of mind. Neither were listening to each other, and I was trying my best to tune them out and not burn the muffins.
I was just taking the muffin tin out of the oven when I heard Clayton say, “What the fuck is that!?” I turned around with the tin still in my mitt-clad hand just as I heard my mother gasp sharply.
Detta was standing in the kitchen with us, still dressed in her floral dress, wings sprouting from her neck.
“Oh, oh!” my mother breathed, “Detta, Detta, you came back to me!” She fell to her knees and scooted herself closer to the image of my sister with her arms outstretched.
Detta said nothing, but she looked to me, unblinking, and then smiled. She raised her gray little arm and pointed to the muffins I was still holding, and the surrealism of it all shocked me into dropping the tin.
My mother and Clayton both jumped and whirled around to look at me, and in the time it took to acknowledge the mess I had made, Detta had disappeared in a blink, and along with her was what remained of my mother’s sanity.
Adela wailed for three hours after that with her face pressed against the linoleum and her arms splayed behind her. Clayton had retreated to his room and didn’t make a peep for the rest of the night.
Meanwhile, I cleaned up the kitchen. As I was picking up the muffins that had fallen from the tin, I realized that there were only five, not six.
Things only got worse from there. My mother couldn’t hold down a steady job and instead spent her days slumped at the kitchen table pleading for Detta to come back. Clayton picked up the slack, but he was barely holding on himself. My mother had lost her mind, and my brother wasn’t too far behind.
The third time I made the now-infamous muffins, I was in my junior year of high school. I had become a solemn teenager and a mall goth with a penchant for pastry. I had found the recipe again while looking through Gramma Amma’s extensive binder of baked goods. She had passed the year prior, and the anniversary was upon us. I took it upon myself to make something to place at her gravestone as an offering. She had been my family’s biggest support through our hardest times, and I always felt that no one had appreciated her quite like I did. Mother was a mess through the funeral planning, so I—at the tender age of sixteen—made most of the arrangements.
That had been my first funeral since my and Clayton’s father passed, and I had no memory of it or of him. I took the liberty of making Gramma’s favorites at the wake: pineapple upside down cake, black forest cake, and toasted banana bread (all found in my archive). No muffins. Not yet, anyway.
To tell you the truth, I was afraid of making the muffins again. My young brain had connected them to the appearance of Detta’s specter, and even though she still visited me in my dreams to remind me of the games we used to play down by the beach, of her favorite shells, of the biggest sandcastle she ever made, I couldn’t handle seeing her in my waking hours. Not gray with tiny wings protruding oddly from her neck.
But for Gramma, I would risk it. It was my tribute to all that Gramma Amma Best née Morton had done for me specifically, and there was nothing better suited for the job than those muffins.
It was a bright spring afternoon when I was removing the muffins from the oven. I was all alone in my childhood home that I couldn’t wait to escape. Cinnamon flooded the room, and I inhaled deeply as I brought my new 12-tin muffin pan close to my face. It smelled of nostalgia and warmth. I remembered my grandmother keeping me close to her as we baked, as we walked to school, as the police searched our home yet again. My eyes burned at the memories. Never had someone loved me as fiercely as that woman did.
I remember upturning the pan and gently dumping the muffins onto a wire rack to cool. I pulled off my oven mitts and turned to see Detta sitting at the kitchen table, expectant. My spine burned as if I had fallen into the oven myself.
Detta. Detta, gray and small. Detta, six years old and baby-faced. Detta with the wings.
And there she sat, swinging her feet underneath the table as if she was alive and real and waiting for those muffins.
So I reached for a hot muffin, burning my own fingers, and placed it in front of her while keeping my distance. The amount of fear I felt is indescribable. My skepticism had waned after the second incident, and my paranoia and superstition had grown stronger from it.
“Be careful,” I said to the ghost, “it’s hot.”
Detta stared me with her wide, marble-like eyes before she smiled and reached out for the hot muffin. I watched her little gray hand touch it, raise it up from the table, and bring it to her mouth.
Tears welled in my eyes as she bit down, chewed, and grinned at me with cranberries stuck in her teeth. It all hurt so very badly.
Clayton walked through the kitchen door just then, having just got off work from the local saw mill, and froze as he saw her. He glanced at me, wide-eyed and fearful, and I looked back at him and nearly broke down. I can still feel how hard I bit my lip to keep from sobbing.
The two of us watched Detta unwrap the rest of the muffin and gobble it down. It was almost too quick, the way she devoured it. I grabbed another, now-cooler muffin and placed it in front of her. Detta kept on eating and eating and eating until I was down to two muffins. She was midway through the second-to-last muffin when our mother came through the living room door.
“I’m home, I’m home!” she called, and I remember she sounded annoyed and frustrated, though I never found out what about.
Clayton and I whipped our heads to the living room, and Clayton began to shout for Mother before we both realized that Detta had disappeared, leaving a half-eaten muffin on the table.
I saved the last one for Gramma Amma.
Life went on. My dreams of Detta became more intense and frightening but just as incomprehensible. One night when I was in my twenties, I had crashed at a friend’s house after a late-night outing, and I had a dream that Detta and I were on a fishing boat that we owned. Only we were both children running a crabbing business, out there in a storm trying to find a blue crab that had the cure for sorrow and all bad things. A kraken rocked our boat, and I fell out into the sea, and Detta came swimming in after me and pulled me to safety.
They were always strange like that, and I know that my therapist (who I know reads this blog) would tell me something deep and symbolic about them. That’s just how my brain expresses grief. The uncertainty and lack of answers about Detta’s disappearance is as haunting as her spectral form, if not more so. And sometimes you just have the deep desire to go crabbing with your sister.
I didn’t see Detta’s ghost again for a long time. I didn’t make the muffins again. I noticed the correlation, and I didn’t want my life to revolve around this one very tragic thing, so that meant I needed to keep from summoning her.
I grew up to be a not-so-well-adjusted adult who started a recipe blog out of boredom and dissatisfaction with my life. Please don’t get me wrong—I genuinely love to bake, and even though my beginnings as an amateur baker are forever marred by the disappearance of my sister, I persisted.
Interest in Detta’s cold case started back recently; a true crime podcast covered her disappearance (albeit poorly and with an inaccurate timeline, although that’s neither here nor there) and soon enough I had people reaching back out to me. I only responded to one.
Two months ago, Detta’s biological father reached out to me. At this point in my life, I was living two towns away from my hometown to be closer to the city and further from the shore, and Detta’s bio father happened to live in the vicinity. He had seen the interest again online and wanted to talk to one of us face-to-face. I was skeptical of him, but he knew things about our mother that the public wouldn’t know. I agreed to meet him at a public cafe just in case he was another weirdo with a messed-up tactic to weasel intimate details from me that I was not yet ready to volunteer.
His name was Dale, and he was a tall blond man with a familiar face and a handlebar mustache I found to be a little too much. We had coffee and sat outdoors underneath a shaded table while I listened to him drone on about why he couldn’t stay with my mother. My own relationship with her was strained, but hearing this stranger say negative things about her was getting on my nerves. I remember asking him why he never stepped forward to help with the search parties, the investigation, or even a phone call to see how we were all doing? Dale fed me the excuse that he was across the country when it all went down and had just married his current wife. I asked him why now? Why wonder now?
Well, Dale was writing a book, you see. He was something of a novelist and had decided to work on a partially true, mostly fictionalized story of his life, and he wanted to know more about the daughter he never met.
I snapped completely. My therapist and I had only briefly touched on my anger issues and instead focused on my strained familial ties and grief. Not the anger.
I launched myself across that cafe table and tackled him to the ground. His head hit the concrete sidewalk, and I wailed on him with both of my fists, cursing and screaming at him for being awful and a poor excuse for a human, until an employee pulled me off him.
I was arrested, of course, but no charges were filed against me. (My mugshot is viewable on mugshots.com.) Clayton came to visit me not long after to inquire about the incident, but I knew that our mother had sent him to find out how Dale was doing. Clayton told me that the recent interest in Detta’s cold case caused the local police department to reopen it to “give us closure.” To hell with closure, I told him, this is all just a publicity stunt.
I continued on and pointedly ignored all calls I received from my mother. I went to car shows and dinners with friends, and I continued to bake. I continued living until something rocked the routine I had built my life around.
Last week, Detta’s bones washed ashore of my hometown. Tiny, bleached, and covered with nibbles from sea creatures.
We never held a funeral for Detta. Mother said she would never lay her to rest because we didn’t know. We just didn’t know if she was still out there.
I called my mother after a few days of processing the news, and she sounded more exhausted than she ever had. She was planning a funeral and asked me to drive down.
Tomorrow is the funeral, and I don’t know how to feel about any of it. There are still so many unanswered questions, and I know once she’s laid to rest, the police and the media will be relentless. So this is my last entry on this blog.
I made cranberry-blueberry muffins this evening one last time for the funeral, and now I’m retiring them. A tribute to Audette Bethany Best.
Even now as I write this, I sit in my apartment alone basking in the warmth of the oven that hasn’t yet cooled and cinnamon wafting in through the room as the burnt orange of the sky sinks and stains a deep blue my eyes always mistake for black. I know, instinctively, that she will never leave me fully.
And still, in my peripheral, I can see Detta staring me down from the corner, her knees tucked against her chest, her face a pale blue and unaging, a soft whimper emitting as if she’s scared and alone in her understanding of things about her that I will never know.
I know that you learned your alphabet, but I also know that you never made it past kindergarten. Still, still, I hope you’re reading this.
Anyway, here is my family recipe for cranberry-blueberry muffins:
The World’s Best Cranberry-Blueberry Muffins
Yields 12 Muffins
Ingredients:
1/2 cup salted butter, softened to room temperature
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
2 large eggs, room temperature
1/2 cup unflavored Greek yogurt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract (optional: ½ vanilla bean)
1 and ¾ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons milk
¾ cup fresh cranberries
¾ cup fresh blueberries
For the cinnamon streusel:
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
3 tablespoons all-purpose baking flour
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons salted butter, melted
Method:
Preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.
Line a 12-cup muffin tin with cupcake liners. Set aside.
In a medium bowl beat the butter on high speed using a hand or stand mixer until smooth and creamy, around 1 minute.
Add the granulated and brown sugars and beat on high until creamed, around 2 minutes. (Tip: make sure to scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl as needed.)
Add the eggs, yogurt, and vanilla extract. Beat on medium speed for 1 minute, then turn up to high speed until the mixture is full combined.
In a large bowl, toss together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt.
Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and slowly mix with a whisk.
Add the milk, gently whisking until combined and little lumps remain.
Fold in the cranberries and blueberries with a wooden spoon.
Spoon batter into prepared muffin pan, filling them nearly to the top, leaving around 2 centimeters free.
Make the streusel.
Whisk together white sugar, brown sugar, all-purpose flour, and cinnamon together until fully combined.
Add melted butter and combine using a fork until the texture is crumbly.
Gently spoon crumble into the muffin cups until full.
Bake for 5 minutes at 425 degrees Fahrenheit, then keeping the muffins in the oven, lower the oven temperature to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and bake for 18-20 more minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
Allow to cool on a wire rack and enjoy.