Vanilla breakfast muffins

It’s SO cold!! I know we should probably all be ‘clean eating’ or whatever it is that we all do to make ourselves feel even more miserable’ at this time of year, but for me, mornings start best when they involve baked goods and a bucket of tea. These vanilla breakfast muffins use real butter and that old fashioned ‘wet into dry’ method. Feel free to add whatever you like to the recipe: chocolate chips are a favourite here. I like to add blueberries, then top the muffins with a sprinkling of granola, which makes them feel extra breakfasty. Remember, with a muffin recipe, you need to assemble the dry ingredients, then the wet ingredients, then stir the wet into the dry, making sure you don’t overmix (a bit of flour visible is absolutely fine).

Vanilla Breakfast Muffins

For the dry ingredients:

200g plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

125g golden caster sugar

For the wet ingredients:

100g butter

125ml milk

1 tsp vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste

2 eggs, beaten

100g chocolate chips (optional)

Firstly, and most importantly, assemble all the ingredients. Make sure you’ve got everything weighed out and ready to go. Pop the paper cases into your muffin tin and preheat the oven to 180ºC/gas mark 4.

In a large bowl, sieve together the flour, baking powder, salt and caster sugar. You can leave the salt out but it does add a lot of flavour, especially if you’re using the chocolate chips.

Put that bowl to one side. Now measure out 100g butter and the milk. Pop them into a saucepan and warm them gently until the butter is just melted. Add in a teaspoon of vanilla.

Transfer the liquid into another bowl (this will help cool it as well). Make sure it’s only just lukewarm before you add the two beaten eggs (otherwise you’ll scramble them). Mix this all together well, then just grab the bowl of dry ingredients and pour the wet ingredients in.

Stir gently with the spoon until just combined. Don’t over mix - this will keep the finished muffins light (this overworking is the reason why everything your child makes turns out like rock cakes!) – if there’s a tiny bit of powder left that’s fine…and if you’re using chocolate chips, stir these in now.

Split the mixture between the muffin cases - this should make 12 decent sized muffins.

Bake for about 20 minutes until the muffins are golden brown and a gentle push on the top makes them spring back up. If it’s squelchy and your finger disappears into the muffin, it’s not done.

And that’s it. So easy to prepare and the best smell in the world to entice lazy teenagers out of bed too. Happy Thursday! x