Friday 29 July 2016

Blueberry and Curd Muffins with Streusel Top

On a dreary summer's day when my mum asks, "fancy baking something?" who am I to say no. My mother doesn't have quite as many baking staples as I have but I managed to clobber together some basic ingredients in a fashion to come up with these muffins. And luckily she had some blueberries that needed eating.

Now I have to confess they haven't turned out perfect and look a bit flat on top but that's because I was substituting a few ingredients (no butter, only a bit of stork left so where butter and stork were required I had to use anchor spreadable plus she also didn't have enough caster sugar so it's a mix of different sugars). The recipe below includes the correct ingredients and I will repeat this recipe soon to remake these (as I also have half a jar of the yummy curd left).

Onto the curd..........at the back of the cupboard, and, surprisingly still in date, I came across a jar of three fruit curd from Chatsworth. The three fruits being lemon, lime and mandarin. Now of course normal curd will suffice but if you can get your hands on a slightly different curd or a curd with mixed fruits, then that would be great. Lemon of course compliments blueberries really well anyway so if that's all you can get, then perfect.

I decided that a streusel topping would go really nice with these. A what? Streusel top I say. It's actually pretty much a crumble. Mmmmm crumble on cake! Unfortunately not having proper butter meant it didn't really work, so you definitely need proper butter, but they add an extra something to them.

Despite there being curd in the batter, I also decided to add a small dollop into the middle of the buns too for that extra fruity hit.

So they may have not turned out perfect this time and the streusel top mainly melted into the batter due to the wrong fat being used, but it didn't stop my dad from demolishing too with cream when he came home from work this evening. Best served warm and eaten on a plate with cream as they are quite delicate and burst with lots of yummy oozy fruit and curd.

Make and enjoy!

Ingredients:
Streusel top:
25g plain flour
85g demerara sugar
50g cold butter

Muffin mix:
175g stork
175g golden caster sugar
200g self-raising flour
100ml greek yogurt
2tbsps curd (lemon or any flavour mix you like)
3 eggs
100g blueberries

Pre-heat oven to 180c fan / 160c. Line a muffin tin with 12 muffin cases.

Start by making the streusel mix. Add all the ingredients to a bowl and mix together to form a crumble with bits of butter still visible. Place in the fridge until required.

In another bowl add the stork, sugar, flour, yogurt, curd and eggs and mix to form a batter. Be careful not to overmix. Dust the blueberries in a little flour, this helps prevent them from sinking during baking. Then pop a spoon of mixture into the base of each muffin case, add 4 blueberries on top of the batter along with a small dollop of curd. Then top each muffin with the remaining batter and add another 3 blueberries to each muffin top. Take the streusel topping out of the fridge and crumble on top of each cake.

Bake in the pre-heated oven for 20 minutes.