One of my absolute favorite Brunch-time Cheap Easy Meals has to be Spiced Muffins. They put me in such a lovely mood. Cinnamon and nutmeg wafting about the kitchen. But cunningly they only take 30 mins to make all in. With 20 minutes of that being those muffins left alone in the oven, you only have 10 minutes of anything to do! Well you do have to eat those magnificent muffins for your brunch-time cheap quick meals too. Not too much of a hardship!
These muffins are not too sweet as they’re a morning muffin rather than a tea-time one. You could add dried fruit, chocolate or a little more sugar for more of a dessert kind of vibe.
Cheap Easy Meals – Spiced Brunch Muffins
This morning, I was forced to prepare these delicacies to ensure a snapshot for this post. Oh the hardships we go through just to blog! One quick thing to mention – although muffin tins would be apt when cooking muffins, this house is a muffin-tin-less zone. No worries. Cake tins (the smallest you have) work but do give a slightly less puffed up, but still light and tasty muffin. I use those small clay dishes for tapas or Crema Catalan as they’re what I have.
In theory this recipe should give you 12 small or 6 large muffins. Not having muffin tins myself this gives me 2 cake sized or 4 tapas dish sized ones. We can demolish one of those each easily.
Spiced Home Made Muffins
Anyway on with the recipe!
Home Made Muffin Ingredients
- 200g plain white flour
- 70g white sugar
- 3tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- a pinch of salt
- 1 orange*
- around 50ml milk**
- 60g unsalted butter or margarine***
- 1 egg
- fresh nutmeg to taste
- cinnamon to taste
* With regards to the orange, if you have one (or a mandarin/tangerine etc) use it, if not you will just need a little more milk.
** Although I am not keen on UHT milk to drink it is all we use for cooking as it is much cheaper than fresh. Look out for it when its on offer and keep a supply in your store cupboard.
*** Yes butter is probably actually healthier but it is pretty expensive so I keep that for eating. In recipes such as this good old margarine is absolutely fine (do not be swayed by the food snobs!).
Muffin Method
Put the oven on to 200ºC while you get on with preparing the muffin batter.
In a large bowl sieve the flour and mix with baking powder, bicarb, sugar and salt. Grate over nutmeg to taste – I like quite a lot.
Squeeze the citrus juice into a measuring jug and then top up with milk to reach 150ml. Add the melted butter or margarine and the egg and beat lazily.
Pour the liquid ingredients into the bowl of flour and stir. You really don’t need to go overboard. Muffins are not averse to a lumpy batter, in fact I think they may well benefit from it!
Grease your muffin tins (or line with papers) or whatever you’re using and pour in the batter. Sprinkle over a little ground cinnamon and pop them in the oven.
20 minutes later your spiced muffins are ready! That wasn’t too difficult and anyone enjoying brunch with you will be amazed by your brilliance rustling up such a tasty morning treat! Well, that’s how it is in our house anyway!
Okay, these muffins do burst out of their dishes a little but where’s the harm in that?
I hope you try and these cheap easy meals for brunch. The muffins put me in a delightful mood for the day, they should to you, too!
For a more self sufficient future
Oh, YUM! These just cry out for dried cranberries, I think. (often called “craisins” — and yes, they do have a bit of sweetener added to make them palatable!)
British bakers are so sensible, measuring by weight instead of volume — actually much more accurate. However, these sorts of recipes throw Americans into fits (some of the terms for ingredients are different, also). I solved this problem by buying a wonderful measuring cup that has multiple sets of measurements on it so that I can approximate the British ones. There are also websites that will do the “translating” for you — try:
http://www.wwrecipes.com/convert.htm
Thanks for the link AG. I improved on the muffins this morning, adding a little lemon zest and a handfull of fresh strawberries from the garden. Wow! Cranberries sound good too. The measuring thing is difficult, In the UK its different to Europe and thats totally different to US. Sometimes I have alterntives noted but often just stick with metric as its all so much easier.