Food on Friday – Strawberry Almond Chocolate Chip Muffins

Markus has turned into our baker and has been very busy lately baking muffins – which in turn has had everyone in the house very busy eating muffins. So this week, armed with both his mixing bowls and my camera, we turned over the Food on Friday blog post to him to memorialize his wonderful strawberry/almond/chocolate chip muffins.

🙂

Start by pre-heating your oven to 350 degrees.  Grab some parchment paper muffin cup liners and put them in your muffin tin. Then gather the ingredients.

You start by creaming 6 tablespoons (3/4 of a stick) of butter at room temperature in your mixing bowl.

Then cream ½ of a cup of sugar into the butter

Next you beat one egg – we prefer eggs laid by colorful hens such as this red one here . . . .

and add it into the butter and sugar.

Next beat in 5/8ths of a cup of milk (which is ½ a cup plus 1/8th cup or 2 tablespoons).

The milk never beats in completely and it will look lumpy.
Add ½ teaspoon vanilla . . . .

And then add your 2 cups of filling – in this case 1 cup of chopped fresh strawberries. . . .

½ cup of toasted almonds. . . .

and ½ cup of chocolate chips. Markus forgot to get a picture of the chocolate chips – but I am sure you can visualize this part pretty well on your own. 🙂

Mix the fillings with the wet batter.

You mix all the dry ingredients in a separate bowl. I use my whisk to blend them all together.
Mix together the following:
2 cups of unbleached white flour – pastry or all-purpose
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon powder (optional)

Then you pour your wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and very gently mix the two together.

Fill each muffin cup about 2/3rds full and bake in a 350 degree oven for 30-35 minutes.

These muffins do not rise a lot but they are surprisingly soft in texture.

And are full of wonderful ingredients in every bite.

We hope you like Markus’s muffins. He took all the pictures for this blog post and will be doing more in the future. He gets full credit since I never even entered the kitchen while he was working on this.  I fully believe in supporting a budding baker in our midst.

This recipe is a fairly basic muffin recipe that allows you to improvise to your heart’s content  You can change up this recipe by using different filling combinations. I like doing straight blueberry muffins with this recipe, as well as mixing of peaches with walnuts or pecans. We are going to try banana walnut using this recipe soon. Mangos would be real interesting too. Let me know if you come up with more interesting fillings.

Have a great weekend. I appreciate your stopping by and checking our blog. Markus really appreciates it because he is betting Chip that he can get more views on his post than Chip got for his Hawk Studio post yesterday. 😀 Nothing like a little blogging rivalry in the family.

Onward and Upward. . . . .