Now that January is done I think we can all indulge a little again without feeling too guilty. So, this week I decided to make some of my favorite little muffins, courtesy of Lorraine Pascale. Now I don’t want to steal her thunder or destroy her recipe, but I decided to make a slightly healthier version of these muffins (following Lorraine’s basic recipe) and they worked. If you look at the normal recipe and then at my version here you will see the reductions quite clearly, so I won’t write all the differences out, but basically I will be reducing the sugar, reducing the butter, using some wholemeal flour, reducing the volume of each muffin and amending the baking times. Here we go…
Makes: 16 muffins
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 25 minutes
Ingredients:
- 150g wholemeal self-raising flour
- 200g plain self-raising flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 2 tsp ground cinnamon
- 175g soft light brown sugar
- 350ml semi-skimmed milk
- 2 eggs
- 100g butter, melted and cooled
- 1 punet of raspberries (fresh or frozen)
Method:
Prepare your muffin tray with muffin cases and then preheat the oven to 180 degrees (gas mark 5).
These muffins are so easy to make, so get your large bowl, weighing scales and teaspoon at the ready and then measure out the flour, baking powder and cinnamon and sieve into the large bowl. To this add the sugar and mix well.
To the dry ingredients add the wet ingredients i.e. the eggs, the milk and the melted (and then cooled) butter. Slowly mix all these ingredients together until they form a lovely batter. You want to make sure you mix this well and that there are no little bubbles of flour – as these will cook into the cake and when you cook them the flour bubbles will remain – yuck.
To this lovely batter add your raspberries. If you want to wash them first (which I would recommend) then you will need to dry them off quite well in paper towels or they will become very soggy in the cake mixture and they will not taste as rasperry-ish as you want them to.
I also break all my raspberries in half, so that there are more to go around. So, take out 16 whole raspberries, put these to one side. Break the others in half and drop into the batter. Mix well then pour some of the batter into a mixing jug so that you can pour the batter into the muffin cases. You should fill these until they are approx. 4/5ths full. I would normally do 2/3rds, but these muffins don’t rise as you would expect – this is why you can’t really spoon the mixture and need to pour it into the cases.
Next, use the raspberries you reserved and place one (you can split this if you like) onto the top of each muffin. The muffins are now ready to bake, so place the tray in your oven for approx. 20 minutes. They should be golden and cooked, but if not then put them in for another 5 minutes. To check they are cooked place a knife or a skewer into the centre of the muffin and when you remove it, it should be clean. If it has lots off mixture on then they are not cooked and need to go back into the oven.
Happy cake making people. It is time for me to eat one with a cup of tea… ummm!!
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