Bakery Style Strawberry and White Chocolate Muffins – fluffy and sweet with a delicious strawberry tang.
A classic combination of strawberry and white chocolate, these muffins are the perfect snack to give you an afternoon energy boost.
I’ll admit to being a bit naughty and buying strawberries out of season. I love to have a big box of berries in the fridge at all times so I can top my granola, whizz into smoothies and make these muffins as a weekend treat.
You can swap with other fruit such as pineapple or rhubarb or blackberries (depending on the season of course). Other alternatives include:
Using dried fruit – like dried cranberries or blueberries.
Using frozen fruit. If you do use frozen fruit make sure it’s either pre-chopped or small to begin with (such as blueberries). Don’t defrost the fruit, and cook your muffins for an extra couple of minutes.
I’ve made a lot of muffins in the last year – I was on a mission to create a great base recipe that I could rely on to produce lovely, tall bakery style muffins.
So these have been made following a fair bit of trial and error! I’ve had dense muffins, overflowing muffins and dry muffins (all tested by my dutiful and brutally honest children – such a difficult job for them) until I finally found the perfection combination of ingredients and technique to guarantee success every time.
They’re really quick to prepare – you can have them in the oven in 10 minutes. Also you don’t need to use a mixer or a food processer. There’s no butter in the recipe that you need to cream with the sugar. Rather, it’s a case of mixing oil with sugar – which you can do it very quickly in a bowl, by hand, then you just need to fold in each of the other ingredients.
I now come back to this recipe time and time again and modify it depending on what I fancy at the time – blackberry spice muffins, strawberry streusel muffins, even a great gluten free mixed berry version (you can find all of those on my blog here).
Here’s a bit of inside information I’ve acquired through my experimentation:
Oil – I use oil instead of butter in my muffins to get a light, fluffy result. Butter has more flavour, but doesn’t give the same result. Also, the added flavour of the fruit yoghurt means that you don’t notice the lack of buttery flavour anyway.
Fruit yogurt – Not only gives the muffins a great flavour, but it’s also the acidic element of the recipe that works with the alkaline (the baking soda) to give a great rise.
No sinking fruit – Although the muffins are light, the batter is actually quite thick. The combination of having a thick batter and also coating the strawberries in a little flour helps to suspend the fruit in the muffin – so you won’t getting everything sinking to the bottom!
My kids love it when I pack them one of these muffins in their lunch box. Half the time I’ve stolen their fruit yogurts to make them, so I suppose it’s only fair that they get something doubly delicious in return.
I’ve been known to use their normal fruit yogurts, the fruit corner yogurts, I’ve even resorted to using 6 or 7 of those little fruit fromage fraise tubes when I didn’t have anything else in. All of them worked well, so don’t worry if you don’t have posh adult yogurt!
You’ll notice I added some coarse pear sugar to half of these muffins. I wasn’t sure if it would brown in the oven, but it doesn’t. I’d definitely add the sugar to all of them next time – it gives a lovely crunch which works well with the soft muffin.
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