Wholemeal Blueberry Muffnuts

For quite a while now I have been seeing posts on US food blogs about baked donuts (edible perspective is even writing an entire book full of recipes for baked donuts). I find these so intriguing I was keen to have a go at them myself. One, Ale is nuts about donuts. Two, as much as I like eating donuts, I am far too clumsy to do any deep-frying. However, it turns out that finding a donut pan in the UK is no easy feat. Also, with my ever-growing selection of different pie dishes, loaf tins in different sizes and some mini Kugelhupf pans I bought in Japan a few years ago and which have not even been used yet, I figured I should not go to any extreme lengths to add to this collection by ordering a donut pan from the US.

Alas, the thought of baked donuts would not leave my mind so it came as a happy surprise that some people (who might have been suffering from the donut pan drought on this side of the pond as much as I am suffering from this) had thought of an easy remedy by creating what I would like to call the Muffnut. I know, genius, isn’t it. I went with Muffnut (rather than, say, a Doffin) on the basis that this is closer to a muffin than a donut. And what is it? It is basically a muffin that has been generously covered with some melted butter before being dipped in sugar. And the result is a light and moist muffin with a good crunch from the sugar, eating which will leave you with the exact same sticky hands you would get from a regular donut. Yum.

Ingredients for six large Wholemeal Blueberry Muffnuts
Muffin recipe adapted from Le Cordon Bleu “Muffins”, recipe for blueberry muffins
225g wholemeal flour
2tsp baking powder
40g brown sugar
100g blueberries
60g butter
1 egg
140ml milk
Extra melted butter and sugar for coating the baked muffins

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 210 degrees Celsius. Grease your muffin tin.

2. Mix the flour with the baking powder, sugar and blueberries.

3. Melt your butter and mix with the egg and the milk.

4. Quickly combine the dry with the wet ingredients being careful not to overwork the batter.

5. Divide the batter between the six muffin holes and place in the oven for ca. 30 minutes.

6. Let muffins cool in their tins for ca. 5 to 10 minutes. Carefully remove the muffins from their tins, brush the muffin tops with melted butter and dip in sugar. Let cool completely.

Just a note on the recipe – if you want to swap out regular flour for the wholemeal flour just reduce the amount of milk to 125ml (and who am I kidding, it’s not like the wholemeal flour can undo any of the damage caused by the added butter and sugar, although, in my defence, I did reduce the amount of sugar called for in the original recipe by a third).