Strawberries in the bag....

Well, it's the middle of Wimbledon fortnight (not that I follow tennis) so what could be more fitting than a strawberry recipe? Strawberries and white chocolate are the ingredients 'In the bag' at a slice of cherry pie. I have a quick confession to make, well two actually. Firstly I'm not a massive fan of strawberries - don't get me wrong, they're delicious but if you gave me a choice of strawberries or raspberries I'd pick raspberries every time. It's the same with white and dark chocolate. White I can take or leave, but I love dark. Anyway, my second confession is that these strawberries came from a supermarket (sorry, I don't know any local places round here...) and that even though there were some from Staffordshire available, I picked the ones from Scotland, much futher away from me. Well, the Staffordshire ones looked grotty, squishy and on the turn, whereas you can see from the picture above how glorious these Scottish ones were. Yum!

I was in a baking mood today and so I decided to experiment with the muffin recipe I've been using a lot lately (I've posted before about blueberry muffins and there should be another post in a bit about a few more muffins!). I doubled the amounts given in the blueberry recipe, but instead of using 200ml milk, I weighed 100g strawberries and pureed them using my stick blender. I then added them to the oil and made up the volume required with milk (so used about 100ml of milk). You can see the mixture of strawberry puree, oil and milk in the picture above.

After I'd added the eggs and mixed the colour was somewhat diluted:

Anyway, without further ramblings here is the recipe:

Strawberry and white chocolate muffins

Ingredients

100g strawberries, pureed to give 100ml

170ml sunflower oil

100ml milk

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

300g self raising flour, sifted

scant tsp baking powder

170g caster sugar

70g white chocolate, chopped into little chunks

100g strawberries, chopped into smallish pieces

Method

Preheat oven to gas 6/200C/400F. Line a 12 hole muffin tin with paper cases. Mix together the strawberry puree, milk, oil and eggs. Whisk to break up and mix the eggs. Sift together the flour, baking powder and sugar. Pour wet ingredients into dry and mix to combine. Remember that lumps are ok, (good even) in a muffin batter, you just don't want any flour pockets. Tip in the chopped chocolate and strawberries and mix in. Fill the muffin cases and put in the oven. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Mine were done in just under 25 minutes I think, because a couple of them started to catch on the top. Revel in the glorious smell of strawberry jam filling your kitchen (so hard to resist).

They weren't as peaked as I would have liked, but looked quite good all the same. I particularly like the way you can see a little bit of strawberry peeking out of the muffin.