Strawberry and Chocolate Muffins

If neapolitan ice cream and cupcakes had a child, it would be these.

I was in my local Waitrose this morning and noticed they sell freeze-dried strawberry powder, labelled SFV, which made me determined to incorporate them into a recipe somehow. These were inspired by the marble cake recipe I posted a couple of month gap, but with a strawberry and chocolate chip twist.

The strawberry powder adds a subtle sharp strawberry flavour, without the dreaded soginess of fresh strawberries. If you can't find any, strawberry flavouring (such as this one) and pink food colouring would work well too!

The paper cases are also from Waitrose and work beautifully for big cafe-style muffins. Just bear in mind that these need a cupcake tray to work (as I sadly found out when they came unwrapped as I was filling them - thankfully a deep rectangular tray and a glass ramekin came to the rescue).

This made 7 decent-sized muffins, and took around an hour and a half to make.

Ingredients

• 230g plain flour
• 180g caster/granulated sugar
• 2 TSP baking powder
• Pinch of salt
• 150g vegetable oil
• 250ml oat milk (or other plant based dairy alternative)
• 2 TSP vanilla essence
• 2.5 TBSP freeze-dried raspberry powder (or replacement as discussed above)
• 150g SFV dark chocolate chips

 Method

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C
2. In a large mixing bowl, sift the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder and stir to combine
3. In a separate bowl, add the oil, milk and vanilla essence
4. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ones and mix until combined
5. Spoon half of the mixture into a seperate bowl.
6. In one bowl, stir in the strawberry powder. Add extra oat milk if the consistency is too thick
7. In the other bowl, stir in the chocolate chips.
8. Line a cupcake tin with muffin cases. Spoon the mixtures in, alternating colours for a marble effect.
9. Bake for 20-35 minutes, until a knife comes out clean when it is stuck into the muffins. Transfer onto a wire rack and leave to cool (or enjoy warm if you like the melted chocolate!)