Recipe: Fast easy berry chocolate muffins

Posted by Bel. The time is 3.49pm here in Wellington NZ

I'll follow Lou and Lotte's lead and not spell out the whole recipe here. It comes from the Edmond's Illustrated Cookbook, a big pictorial version of the NZ institutional tome. The illustrations are mostly full page, full colour, food porn type photos, rather than being useful pictograms of exactly the meaning of those oh-so-confusing instructions.

The recipe is very easy and you only need two mixing bowls to pull it off. (The thing I hate most about cooking, other than how pointlessly time consuming it is, and the overwhelming feelings of anxiety it produces, is the vast amount of dirty dishes the process involves each and every time.) The book says 15 minutes to cook but it took a little longer in our decrepit gas oven.

Iit appears as a "Blueberry Muffin" recipe on page 16 or 19 but I have moved on from the 90s and am flinging other delicious things in with my flour and milk. (And eggs. And sugar. But that's pretty much it, right? Sweet!)

Current favourite is boysenberry and white chocolate. This batch was done with frozen boysenberries and white chocolate buttons (any brand of either - but if you were going for real chocolate, then choose carefully!).

The standard trick with making muffins is to not over mix your mixture. As few good stirs as you can get away with to get your flour and stuff combined in with your wet ingredients and then LET IT BE. You're not friggin Jamie Oliver with your whizz stick pureeing the fuck out of some poor soup.

The real trick is to not throw in your berries/choc chunks/walnuts/whatever until the very last minute. With those frozen berries, you can even place them individually in the muffin tray holes AFTER having filled them with the mixture, as they are very easy to handle if you've just pulled them outta the deep freeze.

Canned berries are a whooooole different story. This is a sample from my second batch (yes, I was struck by the domesticity virus two weekends in a row!!) which was made with a can's full I drained out and then had to add to the muffin mixture before dolloping into the tray.

As you can see, 1) my cellphone takes exceptionally shitty photos, and 2) the smooshing and swirling causes the whole muffin to go very purpley in comparison to the isolated taste explosions of the earlier muffins.

Going on comments from my guinea pigs - I MEAN TASTE TESTERS - both styles were much enjoyed and it was the caramelly goodness of embedded chocolate swirls that was the real highlight anyway!