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Freeze blackberries now to add to baking for a taste of summer during the winter months (Photo: Emma Boyd)
Freeze blackberries now to add to baking for a taste of summer during the winter months (Photo: Emma Boyd)

KaiMarch 1, 2019

Recipe: Blackberry and peach muffins

Freeze blackberries now to add to baking for a taste of summer during the winter months (Photo: Emma Boyd)
Freeze blackberries now to add to baking for a taste of summer during the winter months (Photo: Emma Boyd)

Easy baking to celebrate the best of late-summer fruit. 

This week and next, I’m sharing two recipes inspired by wild blackberries. Having grown up in the suburbs of Auckland, blackberry bushes were rather hard to come by, but now I find myself living a semi-rural lifestyle in the regions, blackberry bushes are rather hard to escape. Lucky me! I take immense pleasure from packing a picnic and the thermos, gumboots, buckets and baskets and heading for the hills (literally), kids in tow, to pick blackberries by the fistful as the summer sun warms our backs. We have picked twice over the last few weeks and now have 8 kilos of berries, washed, dried and free-flowed in our freezer. How lovely it will be adding them to baking and desserts over the winter months for a sun-kissed reminder that summer is just around the corner!

BLACKBERRY & PEACH MUFFINS

Makes 12 muffins

  • 150g butter, cubed
  • 75g sugar (white or brown is fine)
  • 200g (roughly 1 cup) peaches, diced
  • 3 eggs lightly beaten
  • ½ cup milk
  • 250g (2 cups) flour
  • 2 teaspoons cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 125g (1 cup) blackberries, fresh or frozen

Preheat the oven to 180°C and line a muffin tray with muffin cups or squares of baking paper.

Melt the butter in a medium-sized saucepan, remove from the heat, add the sugar and peaches and stir well to mix the sugar into the butter and to coat the peaches.

Add the eggs and the milk and mix to combine. Sift the flour, cinnamon, baking powder and soda into the saucepan, add the blackberries and gently fold until all the ingredients come together.

Spoon into the muffin trays and bake for 20 minutes or until a skewer inserted into a muffin comes out clean.

Let sit for 5 minutes before removing from the trays and placing on a cooling rack.

Keep going!