My Favourite 'Breakfast Out' Strawberry and White Chocolate Muffins.

Hellohello. I like going out for breakfast. With friends and chatter or just my book (Anna Karenina at the mo, FYI) for company, it feels as indulgent as 'lunching' while being miles cheaper aaaand with a nice strong emphasis on cake.

The trouble is, recently I've been treating it as more of a right than a treat. On days when I have to get up crazy early to catch a crazy early train to work which doesn't even start until after crazy early and I therefore have an hour to kill, I sort of feel like I deserve to indulge and have a coffee fueled sit down.

Fine...sometimes, but now that it's light nice and early and aaaalmost warm enough to sit outside, packing up my own treat of a breakfast and pretending not to be freezing while I sit in the sun with my Thermos mug, saving pennies, seems much more appropriate. Especially given that the only places open at such an hour on a Sunday (my most frequent breakfast treat day) are big dirty chains, which have sucked the life out of far toooo many of Edinburgh's indie haunts recently.

So here is my attempt at my favourite coffee shop breakfast: an outlandishly oversized strawberry and white chocolate muffin, and a supersweet, also giant coffee, preferably vanilla flavoured (sorry coffee purists). I'm not at aaaall saying that you wont ever again find me in a squishy (warm) seat in Costa, waving my points card and ordering exactly the same thing as last time, but it will most definitely be for a treat that I really deserve do. With Love and Cake.

Strawberry and White Chocolate Muffins

A few notes:

• Feel free to leave off the crumbs if you want to save yourself a step, I was just going for full on coffee shop authenticity. If you do make them you may have a bit left over. No worries, just pop them in the freezer until you make your next batch of muffins, whatever type they may be, and sprinkle the crumbs over, no need to even defrost.
• You can of course mix this recipe up a bit depending on your fancy...change the chocolate or the jam or both, dark chocolate and raspberry would be fab. You could even replace the tsp of jam with a fresh strawberry...divine.

Makes 6 large muffins

You will need

a 6 hole muffin pan, lined with muffin cases

For the crumbs

25g butter, melted

30g soft light brown sugar

20g caster sugar

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

50g plain flour

For the muffins

200g self raisng flour

100g caster sugar

100g white chocolate, chopped into chunks

125ml milk

75ml flavourless oil, e.g. groundnut or sunflower

25g butter, melted

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1 egg
6 tsps strawberry jam

• First job, as usual, preheat your oven to 190˚c.
• Now make the crumbs by mixing the sugars and vanilla into the melted butter until you get a nice smooth-ish paste.
• Then stir in the flour and you should have a good stiff dough. Press it down into your bowl with the back of a spoon and pop in the fridge while you get on with the muffins.
• Now in a large bowl bowl, sift the flour and stir in the sugar and chocolate.
• In another bowl whisk together the milk, oil, melted butter, vanilla and egg.
• Next we're ready to pour the liquid mix onto the dry ingredients and whisk just enough to most combine, don't worry about lumps too much, there should be no dillydallying at this point, no time to faff. 
• As soon as your ingredients are combined, half fill all the muffin cases with mixture.
• Pop a teaspoon of jam on top in each case and divide the rest of the muffin mix between the cases to cover the jam.
• Now run and grab the crumb dough out of the fridge and break it into rubble.
• Sprinkle the rubble over the muffins and get them straight in the oven.
• Leave them alone in there for 20-25 minutes until risen and golden and firm to touch.
• Leave the muffins to cool in the tin for 10 minutes or so, then transfer them to a wire wrack to cool completely.
• Now feast, you probably deserve it.