strawberry & rhubarb muffins

I'm one of those people who perpetually have a billion things that I want to do, I keep talking about it and sometime down the track (in some case years later), I finally get round to doing it. And as someone who claims she bakes a lot, baking with rhubarb should've been crossed off the list years ago but it was only just the other month that I finally picked up a bunch of rhubarb at the markets and finally did it once and for all.

Armed with a new ingredient, I use it to make what I know best which is none else than the muffin. Here's the recipe for 'Strawberry & Rhubarb' Muffins from a most trusty muffin cookbook I have called 'Mad about muffins'.

Preheat oven to 180 degrees celsius. Line a 12 cup muffin tin. In a large bowl, sift together 300g plain flour, 1 tbsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp ground ginger and 185g light muscovado sugar. Add to the dry mix, 100g melted unsalted butter. In a small bowl, combine together 2 eggs, 185mL milk and 1 tsp vanilla essence. Fold this through with the butter mix. Fold in 30g sultanas.

Fold in 100g rhubarb chopped into 5mm diced cubes.

Add 200g chopped strawberries (I used frozen strawberries which left the muffins a little bit more moist than it probably should've be so definitely recommend fresh strawberries if you can use them). Gently fold into the batter, avoid overmixing.

Spoon the batter into the prepared muffin tin and sprinkle each muffin top with demerara sugar for some extra crunch. Bake for 25 minutes until well risen and golden.

Here you have it! A Strawberry & Rhubarb Muffin.

So if you're wondering what else I have on that list of things to do (well, baking related anyway), there's still ingredients like molasses (the jar is sitting in the pantry waiting to be used), making macarons with the Italian meringue method (egg white powder purchased), cocoa nibs (well I bought that when Wholesome Foods had their sale!), cooking with kirsch (so I finally managed to get a hold of a bottle at Dan Murphy's the other day - not every place seems to have it) and well, that list seems to keep growing and scarily enough, I keep opening up the pantry and finding something else that I've bought and just seemed to have forgotten about! Hmm...oops!