Savoury muffins #2: Buttermilk muffins with blue cheese, olives, tiny tomatoes and herbs

Dr Cupcake's adventures with savoury muffins continue! Last time, I searched high and low for a tasty-sounding recipe with little success, and ended up making up my own, which you'll find here. This time I adapted the recipe to fit whatever I had in my fridge - which is basically what I advised last time!

So I'll admit I went hard on the dairy products. I had buttermilk, garlic yoghurt and three different cheeses in these muffins. The 'Greek style' yoghurt in the picture is a really lovely creamy yoghurt and usually, as soon as I buy a tub, I stir it up and pour in a few tablespoons of olive oil, a few teaspoons of minced garlic, a few pinches of salt, some pepper and some fresh herbs. So it becomes a little tub of homemade tzatziki. This version is what was in my muffins.

My recipe is as pictured and is as simple and messy as it looks. There's a basic 1:1:1 on flour, eggs and dairy (yoghurt/buttermilk/milk), plus a few handfuls of whatever flavourings you want...

 ... A few of which are seen here - some creamy blue cheese torn into small squidgy bits (I used some leftover St Agur which is my favorite blue cheese), and chopped black olives...

... Plus the very last of my backyard cherry tomato harvest. They were tiny, and just starting to dry up a little, so this was a good way to use them.

....And back to the garden to fetch some herbs - chives and thyme.

It all looked both messy and a bit exciting when it was all thrown in.

I dolloped it into a muffin tin which I'd buttered beforehand. I had also cut some circles from baking paper to place in the bottom of the pans, so that they would be easier to get out.

After 20 minutes in a moderate oven they came out golden brown and smelling heavenly.

They need a generous spread of butter and can be either cut or torn up to eat. The texture was light and the muffins very savoury - the cheese and olives came through well, and the tiny cherry toms provided little juice bombs which exploded nicely in the mouth - although this wouldn't have worked with 'normal' sized cherry toms, which would be too big - these tiny ones were only the size of a pea.

Happy muffin eating from Dr Cupcake!

Dr Cupcake's Savoury Muffin Odyssey

As you know, Dr Cupcake is very fond of sweet things. But sometimes, only a savoury something can really hit the spot. My savoury muffin odyssey began one week ago on a sunny Sunday afternoon, when I had a hankering for the sort of savoury muffin that, in my innocence, I thought would be found in every recipe book on earth: a light, tasty, warm and flavoursome treat packed with little bits of cheese, herbs and other delicious things, that would be ideal when roughly torn up and spread with butter. Something like this:

Imagine my horrified surprise when I looked through a good dozen cookbooks and came up with NOTHING. Nigella let me down badly. Bill Grainger - nothing. Jamie Oliver? NOTHING. Okay, I thought, maybe muffins are an American thing: I turned to the American goddess of home cookery and all-round domestic goodness, Martha Stewart. Martha had NOTHING!!

In desperation I went to my CWA binder-file cookbook. Surely the good ladies of the Country Womens Association would be on top of this one. Know what? If they are, they aren't sharing.
By this time I was getting very frustrated, but I had the interwebs, so I googled 'savoury muffins' and came up with a bundle of recipes, most of which sounded actually rather unpleasant. There was only one thing left to do. Make one up. So that's what I did. And that's what, in the interests of happy tummies everywhere, I am now going to share with you.

Dr Cupcake's Bestest Ever Savoury Muffin Recipe

2 cups plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons salted butter
1 cup plain (greek-style) yoghurt, or the same quantity of sour cream
1/2 cup milk
1 cup of the following chopped combined ingredients: sundried tomatoes, crumbled feta, black olives, chives, italian parsley
Small handful of grated cheddar or tasty cheese (optional)

Notes on the ingredients: You can substitute a good, balanced gluten free flour mix for the flour if you are gluten free but the miffins may have a shorter shelf life. You could substitute olive oil for the butter. For the flavourings, really I just thought of the flavours I wanted and threw them in - you should do the same.

Set oven to 175C. Melt the butter in a small saucepan and set aside.

You'll need two mixing bowls, one for the dry ingredients and one for the wet ingredients.

In one, put the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar and mix well.

In the other, break the eggs and whisk them together, then add the yoghurt, melted butter and milk.

Whisk all the wet ingredients until you get a smooth, creamy pale mixture. Then turn this into the dry ingredients and give it all a good stir to combine it well.

This is a selection of the ingredients I put in for the flavouring, and I could try to persuade you that they were all carefully selected but it would be more truthful to say they were "whatever I could find in the fridge at the time". Therefore I had half a brunch of fresh (ish) chives, half a wedge of beautiful handmade Elgaar farm marinated feta, a tub of black olives from the supermarket and the remains of a packet of grated tasty cheese left over from the pizza three days ago. Glamorous? Oh yes.

Here you can see my muffin mixture with the ingredients on top - I chopped the olives roughly, crumbled the feta, chopped the chives into the bowl with scissors and then added my SECRET (well, not so much now) ingredient: Gerwurzhaus 'Venetian Gondola Spice'. This is a mixture of onion, garlic, bell pepper, sea salt, parsley and pepper - well, that's what it says on the label, but this stuff tastes absolutely amazing - all I know is, there's a ton of umami in this little baby. Look for it online, you won't be disappointed.

After you've given the mixture a good mix, and distributed the flavourings evenly, dollop the mixture into muffin cases, as you see here. Don't fill them all the way up because they will rise.

Put them in the oven for about 20 minutes, but check them after 15 minutes. When they're risen and golden, and a skewer stuck into the middle of one comes out clean, they're done.

One warning - they do stick to the paper cases. If this is likely to bother you, either grease the paper before dolloping the mixture in, or dispense with the paper cases and oil the tin really well.





Serve with lashings of butter while still warm - or keep them in an airtight container for a few days - just warm them gently in the oven before you eat them.

With love from Dr Cupcake!!