Blackberry Muffins

Blackberries seemed to come really early here this year – back before the schools broke up for summer – so I’ve actually been sitting on this recipe for a while.

One day after school the kids and I went foraging on the local heath and came home with a large bag full of blackberries. Neither of the kids are huge fans of crumble which is what I like to make most with blackberries – combining them with apples from our apple tree – so I went in search of a cake recipe or similar and actually failed to find anything that wasn’t too complicated. I pulled together the following from several different cupcake recipes that I found online.

Ingredients

• 350g plain flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 200g blackberries
• 2 tablespoons milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 200g caster sugar
• 110g unsalted butter
• 2 large eggs

Method

• Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C.
• Set out 12 muffin cases in a tray.
• Cream the butter and the sugar together in a bowl.
• Add the eggs and mix.
• Mix all the dry ingredients in a separate bowl (flour, bicarbonate of soda, salt).
• In a third bowl place the blackberries and then crush them with a fork or potato masher until all mashed up.
• Add the milk and vanilla extract to the blackberries.
• Add the dry ingredients to the creamed butter and sugar and mix.
• Add the blackberry mixture and continue to stir.
• Spoon the mixture into the muffin cases and cook for approximately 15 minutes (time may vary with different ovens)

The colour of these muffins is quite simply pretty damn weird, but they taste really nice and they’re a fab way to use up foraged blackberries.