Choc and Cheese

Our current Japanese homestay guest loves muffins, so before we start our big health kick, I thought I'd try my hand at some baking. Apart from the odd birthday cake, I'm not really a huge baker. I definitely don't have the perfectionism required for beautiful baked goods, so my attempts are of the rustic variety! 

We were going on a road trip so I decided to bake some savoury broccoli, ham and cheese muffins, a recipe I found on the internet, as well as some sweet cappuccino and white chocolate muffins from my breakfast bible, the Marie Claire Breakfast cookbook. The techniques and ingredients for both sets of muffins were completely different, leading to two contrasting but equally tasty outcomes.

The savoury muffins were delicious. I substituted the plain flour for wholemeal flour in an effort be a bit healthier. It was a really interesting use of broccoli to pack them with goodness! There was a lot more egg in these muffins, and the lightness came from whisking up eggs. They were more akin to frittata than a cake, but that worked really well with the savoury ingredients and made them less heavy and a great breakfast on the road snack.

The sweet muffins were light and fluffy from the buttermilk added in these. The coffee flavour was subtle and balanced the sweetness of the chocolate. There were however, some hitches along the way! The muffins were prepared wrapped in baking paper lined ramekins. Whilst they were moist and tasted great, they were quite a strange shape given some of my inconsistent baking paper cylinders. The white chocolate chips kind of sunk to the bottom of the muffins too! And they certainly didn't look much like the picture.

All in all though, my efforts were pretty good and those tucking in came back for seconds reinforcing that they were actually very tasty!