Tangy Apple and Blackberry Muffins

I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the volume of apples currently smiling up at me from our dining room table. Perhaps it’s a bit of forager’s guilt... 

Did we collect too many? More than we can eat? How many apples do two people really need?

So today I made another effort to use up our collection of wind-fallen apples, by making apple and blackberry muffins. Our local blackberry bramble is still ripening, so we pop over every couple of days to collect another lot. We never seem to have too many blackberries.   

Back to the muffins. A quick search online indicated that recipes for twelve muffins often contain a cup of vegetable oil. I’m just not interested in consuming vegetable oil. So the following recipe is a melange of several I found online substituting ingredients in and out. 

The result, a sweet muffin offset by the tangy apples and blackberries. Delicious warm or cold! 

Recipe

300grams plain flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 egg

Pinch of salt

190grams brown sugar

230ml butter milk

100grams melted butter

250grams bramley apples (chopped into 1cm chunks)

150grams blackberries

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 180C. Sift the flour and baking powder into a mixing bowl. Stir in the sugar and salt.

Step 2: Beat the egg, butter milk, butter.

Step 3: Stir the wet mixture into the flour mixture with a big wooden spoon. Drag it round slowly, making sure the ingredients are well mixed. Then drop in the apple pieces and blackberries and stir again.The mixture will change colour from cream to purple. Very satisfying.

Step 4: Spoon mixture into a muffin tray, lined with baking paper, or paper cases. 

Step 5: Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the tops are golden brown.Let them cool for a few minutes and eat the first one warm!

A Sunday forage and competitive bake off

Chris (my husband) and I spent the weekend with friends, and their four kids, at their place in the country. It was a perfect weekend, collecting fallen fruits from the damson, Victoria plum, and apple trees in the backyard.


We then headed out on country amble and an afternoon forage. We collected blackberries, sloes, elderberries and hawthorn berries from the hedgerows. Being before the first frost, it’s strictly a little early to pick sloes. However given my enthusiasm for making sloe gin, and the potential to use a freezer to act as the all important frost, we picked them anyway.

 
Dragging our haul of foraged goods back to Randolph and Lalu’s house, we quickly agreed to a “crumble off,” with Randolph and I as the two competitors and everyone else as judges. Randolph pleased the crowds with his mother’s crumble recipe, complete with rich and buttery crumble, and blackberries and apples infused with cinnamon. I managed to surprise the judges with my flippant inclusion of elderberries, together with the blackberries, apples, and plums.

The judges awarded first prize to Randolph, which was fair, because the crumble was superior, but sad for me, as it was my first experience of competitive baking!