Breakfast Muffins

I’m a big fan of muffins. A good blueberry muffin, slightly warm, with a spoonful of vanilla yoghurt is a real treat, especially when the fruit is fresh and the berries burst in your mouth with a little explosion of juice and flavour. I’ve also been a long time fan of Prêt a Manger’s breakfast muffins that were, until not that long ago, amusingly named Morning Glory Muffins, and I’ve been meaning to attempt to replicate them for a while now.

They are chock full of nuts, seeds and dried fruit and have helped me get through many a morning hangover whilst still feeling healthy and without having to resort to a full fried breakfast. They also go really well with coffee and with a Bank Holiday weekend ahead of us I thought I would try to make a batch of these muffins as a weekend treat.

The first step was to try and find a basic recipe for a muffin. One that wasn’t too sweet, too greasy or too complicated. A recipe that was versatile enough to add items to and remove items from without any detriment. This proved to be considerably harder than I expected and I can safely say that, after hunting through hundreds of books and websites, no such recipe exists.

I was also adamant that these muffins would be actual muffins. Most recipes seemed to result in little cakes that refused to rise up over the top of the cases, giving nothing more than a pathetic little dome of cake and a dense body underneath. I wanted a blooming mushroom cloud of muffin, spilling over the top of the case like the flesh of an overweight teen girl ballooning out over the top of a pair of low cut jeans.

This is the holy grail of muffin making – a light cup cake shaped base with a delicious cloud-like top that looks as if it is trying to escape its humble origins. But as a beginner I was unsure how to achieve this feat. I could use industrial quantities of baking powder but I didn’t want the end product to taste like bicarbonate of soda. I was also using wholemeal flour, not noted for its anti-gravity properties. And judging by the photos accompanying the various recipes I consulted, it seemed unlikely that I was going to achieve the desired effect.

And then I had a eureka moment. Instead of mixing the wet ingredients into the dry ones as one complete lot, if the egg was separated and the white beaten, like a meringue, before it was folded in at the last possible moment, then the muffin should be full of the necessary air to rise up like a nuclear explosion. The theory was good, but many sound theories have failed in application. Communism works, in theory, said Homer Simpson. But buoyed by my own Archimedes moment, I was awash with confidence.

And so, with wanton abandon I mixed flour (wholemeal and white) with some oats, a generous quantity of dried fruit (pineapple, cranberries and raisins) and seeds (pumpkin, poppy and sunflower), some brown sugar and a little baking powder before adding the ‘wet’ constituents: milk, egg yolks, vanilla yoghurt, oil, grated carrot and orange juice. The whole lot was mixed together and as the oven was heating up, I went to work with the egg whites, whisking them up until they were transformed from a liquid dribble into a billowy mass.

Once the whisked egg white had been folded into the muffin mixture and divided equally between 12 muffin cases, they went into a hot oven and I crossed my fingers.

There was no superstition necessary, however, and after twenty minutes they had risen up and over, just like muffins should. These were no pathetically domed specimens, little cupcakes vaguely masquerading as muffins. These were bona fide muffins worthy of any bank holiday breakfast table, to be served with steaming coffee, a little butter and plenty of late morning sunshine.

Breakfast Muffins

150g of plain flour
150g of wholemeal flour
50g of oats
50g of caster sugar
3 teaspoons of baking powder
A generous handful of seeds (poppy, sunflower and pumpkin)
One orange, zested and juiced
One carrot, finely grated
Two eggs, separated
150ml of vanilla yoghurt
100ml of sunflower oil
Two handfuls of dried fruits (dates, cranberries, raisins)
A pinch of cinnamon or mixed spice
A little vanilla extract

Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl (flour, oats, sugar, baking powder, seeds, fruit and spices). Gradually incorporate the wet ingredients (oil, yoghurt, orange zest and juice, carrot and egg yolks) until you have a batter.

Whilst the oven is heating up (200 degrees) whisk the egg whites until they have at least doubled in size and form billowing, cloud like white peaks. Mix a large spoonful of the batter into the egg whites and then gradually add this mixture to the batter. Try not to overwork the mixture as you will knock out all of the air that you worked so hard to attain.

When the oven is up to temperature, spoon enough of the mixture into waiting muffin cases so that they are almost too full. When they rise in the oven they should have no other place to go except up and over.

Bake them for about twenty minutes or until they are cooked all the way through and a gentle brown colour on the top.

The basic recipe can be personalised any way you wish: Lemon and poppy seed, banana and fudge, cranberry and orange, blueberry and vanilla. Feel free to play around with it and please do let me know how you get on. I’d love to see some pictures. Also, feel free to replace the wholemeal flour with plain white flour if you want an even lighter muffin.