Simple cherry muffins

I don't get to bake as often as I used to, but sometimes you just wake up and feel like baking. Today was one of those days. I thought I'd try to use up the frozen cherries that we have had sitting in the freezer for far too long, so cherry muffins sounded like a good idea. I'm cribbing this recipe, which just happened to be one of the first few search results.

Simple Cherry Muffins

Ingredients

• 1 Egg
• 120g Vegetable oil
• 155g Milk
• 1-2tbsp* Vanilla extract
• 300g Plain flour
• 3tsp Baking powder
• 100g Caster sugar
• 205g Frozen cherries

Method

1. Mix the egg, oil, milk and vanilla together.
2. In a mixing bowl, mix the flour, baking powder and sugar together.
3. Stir the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients.
4. Fold in the frozen cherries
5. Spoon into cupcake cases and bake at 180C for ~25 mins.

*I didn't bother measuring this, so I don't know how much vanilla I actually used. I was pretty heavy handed with it though!

One small snag was that I didn't have a suitable cupcake/muffin tin. I had an idea though (which might end up being an awful one), which was that if I crammed the cases together on a normal baking tray, they'd push up against each other as they expanded and they'd support each other. So goes the theory anyway - we might just end up with it taking ages to bake in the centre because of the proximity. In any case, this is what they looked like going in to the oven.

You know, it kinda worked! They're all weird shapes as a result, but I kinda like that. The ones in the centre were looking rather a lot paler than the ones at the edges though, so after taking this photo, I took the edge ones off the tray and put the inner ones back in for another few minutes.

It's an awful photo, but here's the finished result. I couldn't quite get them onto a single layer on the plate...

And of course, the verdict - pretty good overall. They're not the most exciting muffins ever, but they're nice. They're also not overly sweet, which is usually my concern when trying a random recipe that I've just found online; in actual fact, I'd say that these are nicely balanced. Nothing to write home about perhaps, but they go very well with a cup of tea!