Apparently, my littlest badger is awake from 4am, but lies in her bed, thinking, until she bounds in to start my day at 6am. She is yet to divulge quite what a just-turned-7-year-old could be pondering for two hours pre-dawn, each day: climate change? Social inequality? NHS funding? Who can say.
As well as being perky and voluble – and often fully dressed – at 6am, she is ravenously hungry. All that thinking, no doubt.
As the very inverse of a morning person myself, I try to keep something like these lemon breakfast muffins in stock; if I have some frozen, a minute later I can silence the dramatic protests that warn of imminent collapse from starvation, and rest my head on the kitchen table as I wait to gain full consciousness.
These little beauties are the very opposite of fancy but make a brilliant breakfast or breaktime snack. There is sugar in them, but it’s pretty minimal – you could cut it down lower if it’s something that concerns you.
Hoping that this might be of help to anyone else held hostage by an early riser with a healthy appetite – let me know if you give them a whirl!
Lemon curd breakfast muffins
Ingredients
- 250g spelt/plain flour (or substitute half, by weight, with oats whizzed in a blender)
- 3tsp baking powder
- pinch of salt
- zest and juice of 1 lemon
- 2 large eggs
- 100g milk
- 100g yoghurt (replace with milk if you don’t have it in)
- 100g melted butter/oil of choice, such as sunflower
- 100g sugar of your choosing (You could lower this to about 80g if you wanted to, or replace with honey or maple syrup)
- 12 tsp of lemon curd (optional, but very nice)
Method
- Preheat the oven to 170°C
- Mix together the flour, baking powder and salt in a large bowl
- Whisk together the remaining ingredients in a large jug.
- Tip the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix lightly, only until no flour is visible – the batter will look lumpy and unappealing, but hang tight.
- Dispense into muffin cases of your choosing. I go for a mid-sized version and make about 16 of them.
- Cook for approximately 20 mins, until they are pleasingly browned and risen, and spring back when pressed.
- Muffins don’t stay fresh long, but freeze brilliantly. Defrost for 30-60 seconds in a microwave or at room temperature for an hour or so. I pop one into a snack pot for breaktime and it’s good to go for 10:15.
Other breakfast recipes to try:
10 minute banana and oat muffins
https://raisingbadgers.com/2019/05/10/10-minute-oat-and-banana-muffins/
Manic mornings. Perfect porridge.
https://raisingbadgers.com/2019/05/05/manic-mornings-perfect-porridge/
raising badgers 