You may remember we ran a competition a week or so ago to win a set of 1-Up Super-Mario-Esque Cupcake cases from Just Mustard? Well last week Lara and I put the 1-Up cupcake cases to the test and made blackberry muffins using blackberries we foraged at the local park in Arborfield.
I will admit that I need to revisit the raising agents on this recipe to try and make the muffins rise and 'mushroom' up in the big 1-up cupcake cases if I am going to go for the full Super-Mario effect. More work needed, I think. This recipe makes 6 small muffins (fairy cake size ones) or in our case, 4 huge ones, the size you would expect in a good cafe!
BLACKBERRY MUFFINS - Makes 4/6
INGREDIENTS
75g well softened butter (we used Flora cuisine to give the muffins a really bouncy texture)
250g self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
75g caster sugar
1 large egg (medium will do too)
200ml milk (whole or semi-skimmed)
A big bowl of blackberries. On reflection, I probably should have weighed how many we had but it was about one full cereal bowl.
METHOD
Once the muffins were cool, Lara decorated them to look like Mario mushrooms. We made up some icing using icing sugar and milk and then added a little red food colouring. I have never managed to make natural red food colouring turn anything genuinely red so it came out a sort of gungy orange colour. Mind you, I didn't have any white chocolate buttons to act as mushroom spots either and only had orange flavoured buttons so in the end it worked out quite well. Not our finest baking moment in terms of presentation, but I tell you what, they were AWESOMELY good muffins, large, soft and totally immaculate because they came out of the smooth silicone muffin moulds without any sticking or hassle at all.
I will admit that I need to revisit the raising agents on this recipe to try and make the muffins rise and 'mushroom' up in the big 1-up cupcake cases if I am going to go for the full Super-Mario effect. More work needed, I think. This recipe makes 6 small muffins (fairy cake size ones) or in our case, 4 huge ones, the size you would expect in a good cafe!
BLACKBERRY MUFFINS - Makes 4/6
INGREDIENTS
75g well softened butter (we used Flora cuisine to give the muffins a really bouncy texture)
250g self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
75g caster sugar
1 large egg (medium will do too)
200ml milk (whole or semi-skimmed)
A big bowl of blackberries. On reflection, I probably should have weighed how many we had but it was about one full cereal bowl.
- Preheat the oven to 200 degrees centigrade
- Measure all of the dry ingredients into a large bowl. No need to seive.
- In a small bowl lightly beat the milk and egg together
- Add the butter to the dry ingredients and give it a quick stir - this is where using the Flora cuisine really comes in handy as it is pretty much liquid
- Stir the egg mixture into the dry ingredients but don't beat it too hard, you want the muffin batter to be quite gloopy
- Gently stir in the blackberries. You might want to mash some of the blackberries up to give you a range of textures inside your muffin... personally I LOVE biting into a whole fruit inside a muffin so we didn't bash the blackberries up too much
- Pour the batter into the cupcake cases (making sure to wipe away any spillages so they don't burn
- Bake in the oven for 20 minutes or until you can put a knife (or in our case a wooden satay stick) in to the centre of the muffin and it comes away clean). Because our muffins were very big, they took an extra 4 minutes to cook.
Once the muffins were cool, Lara decorated them to look like Mario mushrooms. We made up some icing using icing sugar and milk and then added a little red food colouring. I have never managed to make natural red food colouring turn anything genuinely red so it came out a sort of gungy orange colour. Mind you, I didn't have any white chocolate buttons to act as mushroom spots either and only had orange flavoured buttons so in the end it worked out quite well. Not our finest baking moment in terms of presentation, but I tell you what, they were AWESOMELY good muffins, large, soft and totally immaculate because they came out of the smooth silicone muffin moulds without any sticking or hassle at all.
