In Search of the Perfect Muffin Recipe...

I am always on the lookout for new and interesting recipes, but one that always seems to elude me is that perfect muffin recipe. 

I have a great recipe for blueberry muffins that I use a lot (when I can get blueberries), but I think it has a bit too much sugar and butter in it for my liking.   Is it possible to get lovely moist on the inside, crispy on the outside muffins that work perfectly every time and are not full of fat?  Or are the words 'muffins' and 'healthy' mutually exclusive? 

The other thing that would make a muffin recipe perfect for me is being able to add whatever filling I want to make it either sweet or savoury.   You know... the perfect base muffin recipe.

So, with that in mind I have set myself a goal over the next few months to try out a few different muffin recipes and see what I find.  I am not going to limit myself to only healthy recipes, but I may try and tweak some recipes to lower the fat and see what happens.

The first recipe I have tried is from Homemade The Handmade Help Recipe Book.

This book was put together by the crafting community to raise money to help the people that lost so much in the huge Australian bushfires last year (2009).  Recipes were sent in from crafter's kitchens all over the world to make a this great home cooking cookbook. The official website for this recipe book is here... and the book can be purchased in pdf format or paperback.

I have just started reading through my book now, and there are lots of recipes that I have bookmarked to try out. 

There are quite a few muffin recipes in the book, but the one that caught my eye was Marvellous Easy Muffins.  This same recipe was submitted by two  different people, and it came with a list of various filling options which I thought was a good idea.  I tried it out with a savoury filling... cheese, ham and corn.

The Recipe (adapted from Homemade the Handmade Help Recipe Book):

220 g self-raising flour (I used normal flour with 1 and 1/4 tsp baking powder)

1/2 cup caster sugar
3/4 cup buttermilk
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1 egg
Flavour of your choice (in this case: 1cup corn kernels, 1/2 cup diced ham, 1/2 cup grated cheese and either 1 tsp pepper or 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper)


It also suggested that if you were making the savoury option, you should leave out the sugar, but I added one dessert spoon of sugar for flavour.


Preheat oven to 200 C
Grease muffin tins
Mix dry ingredients together
Whisk wet ingredients together separately
Make a well in dry ingredients and add wet ingredients and filling.
Mix until just combined.
Spoon into muffin tins and bake 20 - 25 minutes (or 15 minutes for mini muffins)

 And...

They were beautifully crispy on the outside the first day. Today the crisp has gone, but they are still delicious.  They were moist on the inside, but not quite as fluffy and light as I had hoped they would be and they didn't rise as much as I expected, (but that could be due to my use of baking powder and flour instead of self raising flour).

So:  they look nice, they are super yummy, but 3/4 of a cup of oil!!!  They are practically deep fried!  I'm not sure if that was a typo or if they were supposed to have so much oil in them, but the mixture was very wet, so I think I will try them again with 1/4 cup of oil and 1 cup of buttermilk (that reduces the total liquid by 1/4 cup) and see what happens.

If you have any muffin recipes you would be willing to share, please send them my way.  I would love to try them out.

Arabella Chickie in Palma de Mallorca