I bought two boxes (125g) of blueberries from Cold Storage the other day thinking I would make some blueberry muffins using real fruits this time, unlike that last and only time I made stuff out of a box. Also, I recently read a blog post by Happy Home Baking about berry muffins, and the recipe seemed fairly uncomplicated so I decided to give it a shot! A precursor though – I am not a big fan of berries. Partly because I never really ate them when I was young, and mainly because they are so expensive. A strange reason, yes, but I am very much guided by food prices.
The recipe called for non-fat yogurt. I suppose they use the plain ones, but I am determined to go all out with the berries – hence Marigold non-fat blueberry yogurt just for kicks. To be honest, I was a little worried about the colour – this yogurt is blue-purple; I thought it might stain my muffins to look a sickly grey. That would have been disgusting. But I press on.
I love how the muffins turned out. Okay, I don’t have a muffin pan, so I used a mini cupcake pan. I don’t know if there’s a real difference, but to me, muffins must be tall and deep. Nevertheless, I think these domed cupcakes look wonderful, especially with the juicy of the blueberries leaking and leaving purple streaks on the cakes.
The juice stained the cupcake liners too. Now THAT screams utterly divine. Such effect can only be achieved with copious amounts of berries, which really translates to (1) expensive or (2) homemade. But a juicy, leaky cupcake can get messy. But messy equates licking juice off the fingers. Which is not usually a bad thing (unless said finger is grimy and dirty in the first place).
Yummy. And it turned out that the colour of the yogurt did nothing to affect the colour of my muffins. Yippee!
Also, just a little note on the use of sweetened yogurts like the one I used – I assumed that since the yogurt is already sweet, I went ahead to reduce the amount of sugar I used. This does not seem to be necessary. My muffins turned out a little bland, but it’s not unbearable because the blueberries are tasty. Plus, my muffins are tiny, so the lack of sweetness in the cake portions are not as pronounced as I would expect of a bigger muffin that has more cake and less berries (proportion wise).
