I had my mother in law staying over the weekend, she is on an exclusion diet for acid reflux so basically can’t eat anything nice!! Butter is out, so that discounts a fair amount of nice bakingy type stuff (yes I know there are vegan replacements for butter but frankly nothing beats that real creamy, full bodied taste!). I wanted to bake something we could all sit down and eat together. Everyone likes a muffin, right? And most recipes use oil – perfect. I also have always got frozen fruit for smoothies and thought blueberry muffins would be a goer.
I love the way the berries bleed into the cake, they have got such a lovely colour and taste – there is something satisfying about blueberry flavour, kind of sweet and sour and reminiscent of childhood sweeties – I defy there to be any kid who doesn’t like them.
On a side note I remember as kid visiting my grandparent in Somerset and going bilberry picking on the quantocks – I know I can google this but was never really sure what the difference was between blueberries and bilberries.
Anyway back to the point – I just used a basic vanilla muffin recipe but added white chocolate and roasted chopped pecan nuts.
Theses are a real quick and easy snack for the kids to come home to after school. Just make sure they don’t wipe blueberry fingers all over their uniforms like mine do!!
2 medium eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
125ml vegetable oil
250ml semi-skimmed milk
400g self-raising flour (or same quantity plain flour and 3 tsp baking powder)
1 tsp salt
100g fresh or frozen blueberries
100g white chocolate chopped into small pieces
50g of pecan nuts chopped
- Heat oven to 200C/180C fan/gas 6. place paper muffin cases in the baking tin. In a large bowl mix in all the wet ingredients, beating the eggs first. Then add the sugar until you have a really smooth batter – I do all of this in my stand mixer.
- Sift in the flour, salt and baking powder. Mix well but don’t over beat or the muffins will not have a nice spongy texture and will be quite heavy. Add the chocolate and pecan nuts then the blueberries once the rest of the batter is nicely mixed. Stir the blueberries in one by one so as to avoid bleeding the whole mixture straight away. I mean they taste the same but are then an all over purple type colour rather than golden with purple splurges!
- Fill muffin cases two-thirds full and bake for 20-25 mins, until golden – get one of those cake skewers and poke them about a little, if the skewer comes out clean then they are done.
- Leave to cool
