PISTACHIO AND WHITE CHOCOLATE MUFFINS

In a week when we have had friends visiting (hence the complete absence of any posts) we have eaten out a lot, have drunk slightly too much on a couple of occasions, and have spent a lot of money. Obviously it was a fun week but by Friday I was tired and ready to enjoy a quiet weekend pottering about in the flat.

The perfect start was a spot of comforting cookery courtesy of Elena Ho's Muffin Monday challenge on her experiments blog. I love a muffin but since reading about the challenge I hadn't devoted too much time into thinking of a recipe until my visit to the local wholefoods shop, Real Foods, on Friday when I spotted some lovely vibrant green pistachios and the idea of white chocolate and pistachio muffins popped into my head. I picked up a bar of Green & Black's white chocolate to chop up into rubble for the muffins and decided to exaggerate the vanilla in the chocolate with my baking staples of vanilla sugar, a jar of golden caster sugar which is permanent home to a few vanilla pods, and some vanilla extract.

2 cups of plain (all-purpose flour)
1 1/2 tsp of baking powder
1 tsp of bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp of salt
1 cup of vanilla sugar
1/2 cup of roughly chopped pistachios
1/2 cup of white chocolate chips or roughly chopped white chocolate
2 large eggs
1/2 cup of vegetable oil
1/2 cup of milk
1 tsp of vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 200°C and line a 12 cup muffin tin with muffin cases. In a large bowl mix together all of the dry ingredients. In a separate bowl whisk together the wet ingredients and then add the wet to the dry. Stir to combine but do not over stir. Pour into the prepared tin and bake for 20 minutes until the muffins are risen, golden and a skewer comes out clean when inserted into the centre of a muffin. Remove the muffins from the tin and leave to cool on a wire rack before enjoying one with a large mug of tea and the weekend papers.

Makes 12.