With baking, if you get the underlying equation right, you can experiment with all the fun bits like fillings, toppings and decoration. For these muffins I used a base recipe for plain muffins and used my taste buds to guide me from there!
The base was Rachel Allen's 30 day muffin recipe from Bake; it lasts up to 30 days in the fridge, so you make a huge batch and then just use a bit of it at a time. The whole recipe would have made around 45 mini muffins. I had already used half, so this recipe assumes you have about 400ml of some sort of muffin batter, resulting in around 20 mini muffins or 12 huge ones.
If using another recipe, you'd have to adjust the filling amount and cooking time / temp accordingly.
Filling and Topping:
1. Chop up one large Bramley / cooking apple into fairly tiny cubes. Add a slug of water (about half the amount needed to cover them), a few drops of lemon juice to prevent browning, around 100g of caster sugar and a dash of cinnamon or your preferred spice. This will result in a relatively tart mixture, so add more sugar and spice to taste.
2. Stew the mixture in a thick-bottomed pan on the hob until the apples become tender and the water / sugar mix caramelises. If you’ve used too much water – I did – remove the apples so they don’t turn to mush and let the mixture reduce some more.
3. Half-fill the muffin cases with batter, add a teaspoonful of the apple mix (draining each spoonful against the side of the saucepan so it doesn't get too soggy with syrup) and top up with batter so each case is about 3/4 full.
4. Sprinkle a mixture of oats & demerara sugar on top. Next time I might mix these together with a little melted butter before adding for an even more crisp topping.
5. I baked mine at 170 C (180 if not fan-assisted). 15 minutes for mini muffins, 18-20 for medium and 22 for the huge ones. Or thereabouts; they're still a little springy to the touch when they're done.
I made 16 small ones and 6 huge ones and found the huge ones were just a touch more moist.
Another filling I’ve tried is two mashed bananas and 75g of chopped dates (both mixed in to the batter); gorgeous.
Fillings I’ve thought of but haven’t yet tried:
A cup of fresh raspberries and 75g of white chocolate chips
75g chopped walnuts or pecans and a dash of maple syrup.
Apple mix above plus a handful of raisins / sultanas/
Canned pumpkin with allspice / nutmeg / cinnamon and walnuts,/p>
What would you try?