Lekker Brekker Monday: Cheese and spring onion muffins

Muffins are wonderfully versatile. If you can master a basic recipe, give or take, you can adapt it endlessly.

A good starting point is to look around to see what you have that you need to use rather than waste. What’s left over in the fridge/crisper, what’s forgotten in the vegetable rack.

There was a smallish chunk of Cheddar cheese. In the crisper, a half pack of slim spring onions. They were all I needed, other than the requisite ingredients for a ubiquitous muffin.

I found an old recipe for muffins I had made a few years ago and examined it. Sour cream was called for. I didn’t have any, or even regular cream, but I had some low-fat plain yoghurt. That would do.

The mixture needed a flavour lift so I looked around: a hint of mustard powder would add something, as would a half teaspoon of garlic powder. There you go.

I decided to bake them in an air fryer, but the standard time and temperature for a wet muffin such as this in the big old oven would be 180°C for 20 to 25 minutes.

Tony’s cheese and spring onion muffins

(Makes 6)

Ingredients

2 cups/ 500 ml cake/plain flour

2 heaped tsp baking powder

½ tsp / 2.5 ml salt

1 tsp/ 5 ml Hot English mustard powder 

5 ml garlic powder

2 heaped tsp sugar

150 g finely grated Cheddar cheese

4 to 6 slim spring onions

4 Tbsp butter, melted

1 jumbo egg, beaten

225 ml low-fat milk

1 heaped Tbsp plain yoghurt

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C or preheat an air fryer to 180°C.

Grease or spray the cavities of a large 6-cavity muffin pan, or spray the insides of 6 foil muffin tins with cooking oil spray.

Sift the flour into a bowl and stir in the baking powder, salt, mustard powder and garlic powder. Stir in the sugar.

Grate 100g of the cheese and stir it into the dry ingredients, using a fork. The fork helps you to distribute the fine gratings of cheese evenly. Reserve the remaining cheese.

Melt the butter. In a second bowl, beat the melted butter with the milk and yoghurt, then beat the egg and whisk it into the wet mixture.

Pour the wet ingredients into the first bowl and mix with a wooden spoon until just combined. Don’t overwork it.

Spoon the mixture evenly into the six cavities.

Grate the remaining cheese evenly on top.

Oven: Bake at 180°C for 20 to 25 minutes.

Air fryer: Bake at 180°C for 14 to 17 minutes.

Serve with butter and/or Marmite. DM

Tony Jackman is twice winner of the Galliova Food Writer of the year award, in 2021 and 2023

Follow Tony Jackman on Instagram @tony_jackman_cooks.

This dish (well, one of the muffins) is photographed on a plate by Mervyn Gers Ceramics.