Muffin Mayhem!

I realised that I had been getting rather more adventurous in choosing recipes and thought it would be nice to go back to basics and bake something rather more wholesome. So out came Nigella's muffin recipes. As my son doesn't take raisins or blueberries, I settled on her Banana Muffins, which looked like a safe bet, especially since she describes it as "easy and quick for a child to make". And it wasn't my first time making muffins.

But as I was making it, I began to fear that things weren't going well. First, the recipe calls for 2 "oozingly, bulgingly heaped 15 ml tablespoons of clear honey". I tried my best, by the honey wouldn't bulge in this hot weather. So I wasn't quite sure if I got the required amount of honey in. Then, Nigella commands that the mixture should not be over-mixed, "just stir a couple of times". I did as instructed, but the resulting mixture didn't look quite right. It looked really under-mixed, with bits of flour still floating around. She reassured though, that "you will have a not terribly attractive lumpy sludge, but don't worry about it".

So I decided not to worry about it. It went horribly wrong and the muffins turned out like this:

The white stuff isn't icing sugar, it's flour! The muffins didn't rise at all. They were hard as rocks, and bitter, and full of flour! On hindsight, I think I could have taken her "just stir a couple of times" with a big pinch of salt, and stirred the mixture a few more times. I suspect too that I didn't get enough honey into the mix, as the mixture was way too dry to look anything like sludge, even if I proceeded to mix it a few more times.

I was devastated, even if my son thought the muffins were edible, and proceeded to eat them anyway...

The failure rankled so much, that that evening, after the kids went to bed, I proceeded to whip up another batch of muffins. This time, blueberry muffins, which didn't have the silly honey requirement. It called for buttermilk, or yoghurt+semi-skimmed milk. I used the latter, as I had a tub of half eaten yoghurt in the fridge. I didn't have fresh/frozen blueberries but I used dried blueberries. This time round, they turned out beautifully!

They looked good and tasted great as well, and was a lot easier to whip up than the banana muffins. Unfortunately, my son wouldn't eat them.

My confidence restored, I decided to give the banana muffins another go. This time round I put in more honey (about 2.5 tbsp of honey) and mixed it a little bit more. I was most relieved when I opened the oven door and found this:

Not quite as beautiful as the blueberry muffins, and somewhat harder (the blueberry muffins were really rather soft), but much much better than the sad rocks I found in my oven earlier...I will attempt this recipe again, just because I want to get it just right. Does anyone have any tips on this?