The muffin man

"Do you know the muffin man? The muffin man, the muffin man.
Do you know the muffin man who lives on Drury Lane?"

I do not aim to be the subject of an English nursery rhyme two hundred years old, but I was motivated to put my own spin on a recipe for breakfast muffins I found on the BBC website. If you have an hour free, a kitchen, and a few ingredients, you too can prepare, and then bake a dozen. And you do not have to live on Drury Lane.

Of course, the proportions are in metric units. As one TV chef mentioned, baking is a lot like chemistry. Elements react together in proper proportions. As far as actually following the recipe, mea culpa. I substituted Half n half for the milk, as I didn’t want to buy a half gallon of milk I might not use before it went bad. And not having hazelnuts, I used sliced almonds I had in my cupboard for another recipe.

Ingredients

300g/10½oz self-raising flour, sied
1 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
150g/5½oz light brown sugar
250ml/9fl oz milk 
2 free-range eggs, beaten
100g/3½oz butter, melted
100g/3½oz toasted almond pieces (orig.chopped hazelnuts)
25g/1oz dried cherries (mine were labeled "tart") 
25g/1oz dried raisins or golden raisins (brit: sultanas)
75g/2½oz crunchy granola or muesli cereal(optional)

• Preheat the oven to 180C/350F and line a muffin tray with parchment paper for muffins.
• In a large bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon
• Stir in the sugar.
• In a separate bowl, whisk together the milk, eggs and melted butter, then pour into the dry ingredients and quickly mix together.
• Fold in the almond pieces, dried cherries and raisins.
• Divide the batter between the 12 muffin cases and sprinkle the top of each with the granola.
• Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the middle of the
• muffins comes out clean. Leave to cool for five minutes in the tin before
• serving warm or at room temperature.

If using the granola, it would probably work better following the recipe – which sprinkled it on top of the batter in each muffin tin. I folded Muesli cereal a little crushed up by hand, into the batter and baked it. I served the muffins warm, and perhaps even Paul Hollywood would like them. They weren’t “underbaked” or “stodgy”.