The Real Muffin Co

A road not taken

A few hundred months ago my good friend Jaqua and I decided to set up a muffin company. Jaqua is Canadian and knows a good muffin when she sees one, and knew a good thing when she saw a gap in the just budding fashion for muffins over here in the UK. We were very sniffy about what we considered our only rivals, The Canadian Muffin Company, dismissing their product as bland and full of bran. They appear to be still around in a very small and undistinguished way with a terrifyingly bad website, so maybe we were right, or maybe we weren’t. Anyway, we did market research by standing outside their shop in Covent Garden and counting the customers - they were busy, but we would be busier. Other muffins were appearing in chain cafes, horrible sickly sweet claggy things, made huge in order to distract from the vile taste, so we knew we were on the right track but we would be better.

We had a vision - scrubbed floor boards, washed in pale blue, white marble counter tops, wicker baskets brimming with gorgeous golden baked goods, an American quilt on the wall, home made ice cream and frozen yoghurt for the summer months. Yeah, it was bit 90s, but then, it was the 90s.

We drew up spread sheets and business plans and talked to the bank and got advice from big wigs - we even had a solicitor, because that’s the kind of gal Jaqua is.

Anyway, to cut a long story fairly short the business did not happen. We did start, I made the muffins to Jaqua’s meticulous recipes and Jaqua would deliver them either as tester gifts or as small orders to places I had worked in (anyone remember O’Keefes in Mayfair? Fabulous deli and cafe, now no more, where I got a serious addiction to caper berries), before going to her full time job as TV producer.

During this time as we were testing the water I became pregnant, a joyous if badly timed spanner in the works, as neither of us could see how we could successfully start a business while one of us was starting a baby, and also looking for a new home in which to house said baby. But we ploughed on for a while until one memorable night when I was baking hundreds of muffins in my small flat, seven months pregnant, during a heatwave, a car alarm going off over the road all night and using a domestic oven (so 24 at a time), that I blew a small gasket and said ‘enough’.

Our customer for this particular order was the very hip and happening Big Breakfast TV show, long gone now of course. The night of baking the many muffins was for the production team post show something or other; I didn’t know or care by then because I knew that I couldn’t follow through with our plans as I got increasingly rounder and more imminently homeless.

So the Real Muffin Co never took off. I am sad about that because I think we would be gazillionaires by now if it had, obviously, but Jaqua and I had fun planning and plotting and looking at logo designs all those years ago.

Jaqua became my son’s godmother and has been faithful to the role for 30 years and counting. Our friendship has stood the test of time and many miles as she moved to Australia and then back home to Canada. She visits the UK every couple of years to renew her residency stuff and when we can we meet up and spend giddy hours catching up. Friends like her are like gems, rare and precious. The years and the miles don’t matter, nor the fact that we rarely speak - we pick up right where we left off. Jaqua is sister to Kelly who is in the photograph in my last post (and may well have been with us that messy night). It is Jaqua’s birthday today and so I have made Blueberry Muffins in her honour, from a book she gave me that is now in tatters.

Blueberry Muffins (recipe in cups because that’s how I make them - conversion table here)

makes 10

The tattered book, the muffins, Jaqua and her godson here in Wales two years ago.

Ingredients

1 ¾ cup plain flour

½ cup golden castor sugar

3 tsp baking powder

1 cup blueberries (frozen is fine)

1 cup milk (or half and half milk and plain yoghurt with is what I used for this batch , or 1 cup buttermilk)

½ cup melted butter (120g - it’s hard to measure ½ cup of butter before it’s melted!)

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla essence

Method

Pre heat the oven to 190oC/170 fan/ Gas 5

Combine dry ingredients including blueberries in a bowl, sieving the flour.

In another bowl whisk the egg, add the milk and yoghurt and melted butter and whisk a little more.

Add the egg mix to the dry mix and fold together gently - do not over mix, Jaqua is very strict about that.

Put the batter into 10 muffin cups. I don’t know why 10. Maybe Canadian muffin trays have only 10 cups.

Sprinkle with a little demerara sugar for added crunch factor if you like.

Bake for 20 minutes.