bluffin' with my muffins

I wouldn’t usually talk about baking. Not that I don’t bake. Baking just seems to be more common knowledge to a lot of people, and there is lots of good information on cakes, cookies, pies and the like already - it makes me feel that adding my two cents won’t amount to much (although I guess it’s been a while since two cents amounted to much). Still, the mood strikes me every once and a while. Muffins!

Muffins are like sandwiches, or cookies, or bread itself – there are so many styles and types that it’s more of a category than it is a specific thing. What I want to share here is a simple – but effective – recipe that I’ve been using for a while as a base for other recipes. It’s crumby, soft, and buttery - somewhere in between a muffin, a cupcake, and a pound cake:

so crumbly

250g flour

150g sugar

1 egg

110g butter (melted)

lemon zest

200ml milk

1 tsp vanilla

Bakes 15 to 20 minutes at 190 C. Get a good bit of lemon zest. That really gives a fresh, delicious punch to the finished product. Also, consider other citrus for unique flavors: orange, grapefruit, lime. 

It’s fairly simple to leave it at that, but it’s the upgrade from a simple morning muffin into something approaching a dessert that will make this feel decadent – and we are going for decadence here. I mean come on, it’s a dessert. There’s no diet dessert in my book - the very fact that you’re eating dessert should jump you past worrying about calories (yeah, diet soda, I’m talking to you too).

If we slathered icing on top it would feel like a cupcake. We don’t want that: the post title clearly says “muffins”. Let’s attack it from the inside. Making some kind of pastry cream filling is not too difficult a task. Whipped cream is another easy substitute. This time though, we’ll do a mascarpone blueberry jam filling - because on top of managing to sound inspiringly fancy, it’s a breeze to make. If you don’t have a pastry bag, you can always use the old cutting-a-corner-off-a-Ziploc-bag approach:

2 parts mascarpone cheese (you could use cream cheese)

1 part jam (went with blueberry this time)

Combine in a bowl until it's one cohesive color. Couldn’t be simpler. You could bulk it out with whipped cream if you need more (and don’t want to pay for the mascarpone). Pipe that in either through the top or bottom of the muffin, and enjoy!