Blueberry Cheesecake Muffins

It’s been a few weeks again unfortunately – I’m still not convinced about this working full time business. Anything that cuts down on my baking time is not acceptable! Luckily I managed to carve out the whole of Thursday this week and spent most of it baking.

To start with, I baked this year’s Christmas cake. I started to see the stands full of ingredients in the shops last week and took it as a hint to get organised. On Wednesday then, I found myself making the house toxic with brandy fumes...on Thursday I spent 10 minutes cutting out strips of greaseproof paper to fight with/line the baking tin with, baked, wrapped, cooled, wrapped again before stuffing the cake into a tin to drown in brandy once a week until Christmas. It’s a lot of effort but so worth it in the end!

Following this then I wanted something quick and simple to bake. Muffins fit the bill but in order to make them a bit more interesting I decided to develop an idea I had a while back, to bake cheesecake mixture into them. Last time, I’ll admit I took the easy way out and used a pre-made mixture, however this time I decided to whip up a very basic cheesecake filling myself.

So idea planned and recipe written...and then I realised I’d used cheesecake in my last two recipes. Originality is clearly not my strong point at the moment! I’ve obviously just got cheesecake on the brain, it is my favourite dessert after all! So yeah, cheesecake again I’m afraid! I’ll leave it alone for a while now I think, I suppose there can sometimes be too much of a good thing!

Some Final Tips Before You Get Started:

• As ever with muffins, mix as little as possible – just combined means just combined.
• Make sure the butter is cool before adding it to the other liquid ingredients.

Blueberry Cheesecake Muffins

Ingredients

For the Cheesecake Mixture:

240g Cream Cheese

50g Caster Sugar

1 Egg

½ tsp. Vanilla Extract

350g Plain Flour

Pinch of Salt

2 tsp. Baking Powder

½ tsp. Bicarbonate of Soda

160g Caster Sugar

70g Unsalted Butter (melted and cooled)

270ml. Buttermilk

200ml Whole Milk

1 Egg

½ tsp. Vanilla Extract

125g Blueberries

12 hole muffin tin.

1)      Preheat the oven to 170◦C and line a muffin tin with muffin cases. To begin, make the cheesecake mixture by stirring together the cream cheese and sugar. Add the egg a little at a time and stir until smooth. Finally mix in the vanilla extract before placing the mixture into the fridge to chill.

2)       In a large bowl, sift together the flour, salt, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda. Add the caster sugar and stir together briefly.

3)      In a large jug, combine the melted butter, buttermilk, milk, egg and vanilla extract. Whisk together until combined.

4)      Add the wet ingredients to the bowl of dry ingredients and mix until just combined. The mixture should still be lumpy. Add the blueberries to the batter and briefly stir until evenly distributed throughout.

      5)      Divide the batter evenly between the muffin tins. Top with a teaspoon of the cheesecake mixture and         swirl briefly with the muffin batter. Bake for 35 minutes until golden brown. Leave to cool completely before eating.