Strawberry and Banana & Blueberry and White Chocolate Muffins!

So the other day a couple of the girls called over to my house for an evening of Twin Peaks watching!  We are trying to work our way through the series, and so far have managed to watch Season 1, and episode 1 of Season 2 about 3 times, it's a really bad episode and very hard to get through.  We usually leave it so long in between watches that by the time we decide to start Season 2 again, we need a major recap on Season 1.  Anyway, because of this, I decided to try out a couple of muffin recipes.  The other half had kindly brought me home a load of strawberries and blueberries, which I wasn't going to finish by myself so I thought this was the perfect way to use them up.

The first recipe I tried was Strawberry and Banana muffins, and I got the recipe from this lovely website full of scrumptious food For the Love of Cooking.

Here's Stage 1: Yum yum

And here's the finished product: Yummier!

Recipe (Makes 12)
(Note, the original recipe which you can find on the link above uses cups as measurements, I have converted these (with much difficulty surprisingly) to grams, and they seemed to turn out quite nice so hopefully my maths works!)

Dry Ingredients:
280g Plain Flour
1/4 teaspoon Baking Soda
1 & 1/2 teaspoon Baking Powder
1/2 teaspoon Salt
1 & 1/2 teaspoon Cinnamon
Fresh Strawberries diced (Note: I found the best way to measure the amount of strawberries needed was to dice and add as required to the muffin mix, the original recipe asks for 1 & 1/2 cups which is quite hard to convert to grams so I kind of just guessed at this. I love strawberries, so the mix was packed!)

Wet Ingredients:
165g Brown sugar (I used Demerara which is quite chunky but worked nicely)
2 eggs
113g butter, melted
2 Large Ripe Bananas, mashed
1 teaspoon vanilla (added this myself)

Method:
1) Preheat oven to 180°C
2) Combine all the dry ingredients and fold in Strawberries
3) Combine all the wet ingredients in another bowl
4) Slowly combine the 2 mixes but don't overmix
5) Bake in muffin tray for 20 - 25 mins

The second recipe was Blueberry and White Chocolate muffins which I found at BBC Good Food.

Again, here they are before they go into the oven:

And here they are when done: (they don't look quite as appetising as the ones above because I think I left them in the oven a little bit too long, but they still tasted great!)

Recipe (Makes 12)

Ingredients:
300g Plain Flour
100g Golden Castor Sugar
1 tsp Baking Powder
2 pinches Salt
1 tsp Vanilla Essence
2 Eggs, beaten
100g Butter, melted and cooled
200ml Milk
150g Blueberries
150g white Chocolate, chopped


Method:
1) Heat oven to 180°C
2) Add Blueberries and White Chocolate to the Flour, Castor Sugar, Baking Powder and Salt
3) Combine the wet ingredients and mix into dry, again, don't overmix.
4) Bake for 25 - 30 mins


Both recipes are so simple and really quick to make.  I couldn't believe how quickly both batches were done.  As for the feedback I got, the Blueberry and White Chocolate ones went down much better, they barely lasted the night. Because of the milk in that recipe the consistency was much more moist and the melted white chocolate didn't hurt either!


In comparison the Strawberry and Banana muffins were much drier, I think in this case the Banana is used to add moisture to the mix which didn't work quite as well, I even noticed this when I was putting the mix into the tin.  However having said that, when I returned to the website, the original poster had suggested serving the Strawberry and Banana muffins with some butter, reluctantly I tried this, and it was absolutely gorgeous.  In conclusion I think these would make a perfect breakfast muffin (that's how I finished off the batch anyway!) and the Blueberry ones are the ones I would save as a special treat for myself!