What makes a perfect muffin?

What makes a good muffin? To me it needs to be warm, moist and wholesome. If you have tried a fresh baked muffin from Steel Espresso in the mornings you will know exactly what I mean! Not only do the staff get creative with the daily flavours but their muffins are consistently moist with a crisp “muffin-top” that makes a die-hard foodie like myself extremely jealous!

Well, that jealousy and my obsessive curiosity got the better of me and I attempted to re-create the perfect muffin at home (although it wasn’t perfect – more on this later).

The recipe I used is Kim’s Moist Muffins from Best Recipes (yes it was a risk).

Ingredients
220g self-raising flour (I don’t have scaled so used 1 7/8 cups)
½ cup veg oil
¾ cup milk
½ to ¾ cup caster sugar (depends on your flavour i.e. sweeter flavours will require less sugar)
1 egg lightly beaten
1 tspn vanilla extract
150g of flavour of choice. Common picks are blueberry, white choc & raspberry, choc chip, pinapple & passionfruit pulp or a carrot one which I made using grated carrot, 2tspn cinnamon, 2tspn nutmeg, sultanas, walnuts and shredded coconut.

Method
Preheat oven @ 180C
Mix the dry and wet ingredients in two separate bowls.
Add the wet ingredients into a well in the dry ingredients.
Add the flavours
Mix but don’t overmix! Mixing wet ingredients with flour causes the gluten strands to form and overmixing will give you a very tough muffin. Mix it in big whirls until the flour just disappears and don’t be scared of lumps.

Bake for 15-20mins until lightly browned

The result:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Well the photo certainly looks great but how did it taste? Unfortunately it wasn’t quite sweet enough (I used 2/3 cup – will go for the full ¾ cup next time) and texturally it didn’t live up to my Steel Espresso muffin benchmark (slightly drier and didn’t have that springy, fleshy cake like texture).

So it’s back to the drawing boards for me. If you have a great muffin recipe please, please share it with me!