Soooo….I made these muffins because I was craving a hearty, fairly dense muffin for breakfast. Don’t get me wrong, I love light, airy muffins too but not for my breakfast. I prefer breakfast muffins to taste like a halfway point between bread and cake so that’s what I was going for with these.
You can replace the blueberries with blackberries (equal quantities) or bananas (2 medium bananas chopped up). Likewise, you might want to sub the walnuts for pecans or almonds (preferably not slivers – either whole or chopped)
Makes about 10 medium muffins
*smaller than the type you get at Starbucks and Costas and stuff*
6 tbsps muesli (any kind) + 3 tbsps muesli
3 tbsps milk + 2 tbsps milk
3 tbsps orange juice
4 oz melted butter (roughly 1/2 a regular supermarket block)
6 oz plain flour
2 tbsps bread flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
4 oz sugar
2 eggs, beaten lightly
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 oz chopped walnuts (you can add an extra 1 oz if your museli is nut-free, mine had almonds in it so I only used 2 oz of walnuts)
1 regular punnet (or 250g) blueberries (frozen is fine too)
To make the muffins:
First prepare the muesli by soaking the 6 tbps it in 3 tbsps milk and 2 tbsps orange juice for about 30 minutes or until you can see that it’s quite ‘mulchy’ (love this word!) The 3 spare tbsps of muesli are to be kept aside as crunchy ‘topping’.
Preheat the oven to 150 deg.c
Mix the plain flour, the bread flour, the baking powder and sugar together in a large bowl.
Make a space in the middle and pour in the eggs, the 2 tbsps milk, vanilla extract and then mix it all in together until well combined.
Pour in the melted butter and mix till well combined. Then add the muesli mulch :), the blueberries and walnuts and mix again until it is all well spread through the batter.
Spoon the mix into muffin cases, till the cases are about 3/4 full. I put my cases on a baking tray as they are quite sturdy but you can put them into a muffin tray if yours are quite flimsy.
Top each muffin with a sprinkling of the dry muesli. Place in the oven for 10 mins.
Increase the heat to 180 deg.c after this first 10 minutes (I didn’t want it too hot to start as I didn’t want the muesli topping to brown too fast). Let it bake for another 6 minutes and then turn the tray 180 degrees and let it bake another 6 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle of a muffin comes out clean (no gooey stuff stuck to it). The turning of the tray is so that the muffins can brown more evenly.
Cool on a wire rack or some place where air can circulate underneath the muffins. Eat them!!! And you can store them too, for 3 days in an airtight container.
One Hundred Years of Plenitude 