Marmalade donut mini-muffins

When one doesn't often eat breakfast, making marmalade, whilst enjoyable, leads to a "now what do I do with all this" problem.

On account of not going to yoga yesterday (having come off my bike, I thought it a little anti-social to go and use the studio's mats whilst my shins and ankle were still oozing and weeping), I decided to make marmalade cakes.

The following is an amalgamation of two or three Nigella recipes, a hefty dollop of Bryony's Mum's recipe, all served up with a few bits of my own devising:

Muffin mixture

200g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarb
2 teaspoons baking powder
75g golden caster sugar
75g butter
100ml milk + 100ml plain yoghurt (or 200ml buttermilk)
1 egg

Other ingredients

Marmalade
50g butter
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp fresh ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp Mixed Spice
Granulated sugar

Method

Preheat the oven to about 175C. Sift the flour, bicarb and baking powder, and mix together the dry ingredients. Melt the butter, and stir it into the yoghurt and egg. Gently combine the wet and dry ingredients, taking care not to over-stir.

Put teaspoons of the mixture into silicone mini-muffin cases so that the cases are just under half-full, and make a little "well" in the centre of each. Put small dollops of marmalade into each well. Then put another teaspoon of muffin mixture on top, making sure to seal in all the marmalade (otherwise it will boil out as a horrible sticky mess).

Put into the preheated oven and bake for about 15 minutes until golden.

Once the muffins have been taken out of the oven, melt the other butter in a pan with the spices. Carefully remove the warm muffins from the cases, dip them in the melted spiced butter, dunk in the sugar, and nom immediately.

Variations

I also made some full-size muffins like this, but rather than faffing around with melting butter, I sprinkled the spices and some demerara sugar on top before putting them in the oven. Equally, I think it would be perfectly sensible to mix the spices in the flour whilst making the muffins, but I only thought of that after putting the muffins in the oven.