A late batch of muffins–Mixed Berry Muffins

6 February, 2013 by Neets | 3 Comments

I’ve had the first half of the week off work which meant I wasn’t doing the usual muffin mix over the weekend. Late afternoon it dawned on me I had nothing for morning tea. I also had a couple of punnets of blueberries and a punnet of strawberries needing to be used.

A quick online search for a mixed berry muffin resulted in several good candidates. But I settled on this recipe by Ina Garten, from her book: barefoot contessa at home.

I made a couple of changes. One obvious one, I used only two berries. The recipe is for Tri-Berries. I could have added frozen raspberries or cranberries but I was happy with just the blueberries and strawberries. 

Since I was baking these for work morning tea and tomorrow is Thursday I opted to make only 1/2 of the recipe. The recipe said it would make 16-18 muffins. I still got 12.

The recipe is adjusted for 12 muffins using just two berries. Feel free to visit the link above for the original recipe.

Mixed Berry Muffins

Ingredients

• 1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
  1½ teaspoons baking powder
  1/4 teaspoon baking soda
  1/4 teaspoon salt
  2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
  3/4 cups yoghurt
  1 extra-large egg, lightly beaten
  113gm butter, melted
  ½ cup fresh blueberries
  ½ cup diced fresh strawberries
• 3/4 cup sugar
• Raw sugar for sprinkling
  Instructions
• Heat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius.
• Line muffin tins with paper liners.
  Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon together in a large bowl. Stir with your hand to be sure the ingredients are combined.
• In another bowl, combine the yoghurt, egg, and melted butter.
• Make a well in the middle of the dry mixture, pour the wet mixture into the well, and stir until just combined. There will be some lumps but don’t overmix the batter!
• Add the blueberries, strawberries, and sugar and stir gently to combine.
  Spoon the batter into the muffin cups to 3/4 the liners.
• Sprinkle each muffin with a little raw sugar.
• Bake for 18-20 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean and the tops are nicely browned.

I was surprised that I got 12 muffins. I originally only put 10 liners out expecting to just scrape enough to fill them. I didn’t skimp on how much batter I used either. The only fussing about was to ensure that each and every muffin got a piece of strawberry. There were plenty of pieces, but they weren’t necessarily evenly distributed.

I love the smell of berries baking. I have suddenly realised that I much prefer strawberries baked to eating them raw. Love them in a Rhubarb and Strawberry pie (must share that recipe), and I love the smell of them being baked.  It’s such an intense jammy smell.

I’m definitely looking forward to tomorrow’s morning tea. With light fading I was trying to work fast to get the photos. Which meant that our “sample” muffin was still warm. I also think I prefer my muffins eaten warm from the oven. What would we do without microwaves?

Is it 10 o’clock yet? Well close to 10 … pm.

You may have noticed the recipe called for Cinnamon. Yes I used it. And yes Mr Fussy could detect it, even though I thought it was pretty subtle. He’d have preferred these minus the cinnamon. Since these are not for him I don’t feel the slightest bit bad about the cinnamon. Other than that, these got the thumbs up.

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