Cranberry & Cream Cheese Muffins

Last weekend I baked some chocolate cupcakes with a cream cheese frosting which left me with quite a lot of cream cheese left over. I don’t actually like eating it as cheese so I went looking for a recipe that would use it up.

I came across this recipe on the BBC Good Food website; you can see it here

What you’ll need:

100g soft cheese 
250g caster sugar
175g cranberries
200g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
75ml flavourless oil, such as sunflower
1 tsp vanilla extract

 

What you do:

Heat your oven to 190°c and prepare your muffin tray with the cases.

Beat the soft cheese and sugar together in a bowl and then chill till needed.

If you’re using fresh or frozen cranberries, then heat them in a pan with 25g of the sugar until they pop, then mash. I used dried cranberries which worked just as well.

Sift the flour, sugar, baking powder and a pinch of salt into a bowl. And, then add the eggs, oil, vanilla and cranberries and mix together. Divide the mixture between the case, about 2/3 full.

It’s worth noting that this makes quite a stodgy mixture that it was quite hard to get off the spoon. I wasn’t sure if this was right so added a splash of milk to make more pliable.

Make a dip in the centre of the muffin (easier said than done with such a non-compliant stodgy mixture). Then spoon in the cream cheese mixture.

Bake for approx 25 minutes or until golden brown. Leave to cool on a wire tray.

I didn’t consider these to be one of my successes, the muffins sunk a bit after coming out of the oven and also had this crusty edge to them. Not one I’ll bake again if I’m honest. But they did taste better than they looked.