If you love lemon desserts, these lovely Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins are perfect for you. They are wonderfully dense, moist, buttery and lemony. Simply incredible!
240gramsyoghurt / sour cream, full fat plain yoghurt/sour cream
1tsppure vanilla extract
Lemon Glaze:
50gramssugar, 1/4 cup
3tbsplemon juice, freshly squeezed
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Instructions
Preparing to make muffins:
Preheat oven to 180 C and place the oven rack in the centre of oven.
Line a 12 cup muffin pan with paper liners.
Preparing dry ingredients:
First, have ready all the DRY ingredients.
In a bowl, whisk together the sifted flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and poppy seeds.
Next, using a microplane or box grater, grate lemon zest from one lemon.
Add the grated lemon zest into the sugar. Using a fork, rub the lemon zest evenly into the sugar and set aside. And we are ready to make the muffin batter.
Making the muffin batter:
Have ready all the WET ingredients.
In a bowl of a stand mixer and using a paddle attachment, beat butter and sugar (with lemon zest) on medium high speed until light ad fluffy. This takes about 5 minutes. While mixing, stop the mixer to scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl to ensure everything gets all mixed together.
Then beat in eggs, one and a time, beating well after each addition.
Next add in the plain yoghurt and vanilla extract. Beat until well blended.
Then add in the DRY flour mixture and start to beat on low speed and beat until JUST moistened. Do not OVERMIX.
Remove bowl from stand mixer. Using an ice-cream scoop, spoon batter into each of the prepared muffin cups.
For the smaller muffin cups (such as IKEA DRÖMMAR pan), batter used for each muffin cup is 1/4 cup batter or 60g batter.
For bigger size muffin cups (regular pan), batter used for each muffin cup is 1/3 cup batter or 85g batter.
Bake for about 18 to 20 minutes.
The muffins will rise and turn golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the muffin comes out clean.
Making Lemon Glaze:
While the muffins are baking in the oven, prepare the lemon glaze. Have ready lemon glaze ingredients.
First cut the grated lemon earlier into halves.
Using a juicer, extract the lemon juice.
Use a strainer to strain the lemon juice into a measuring cup. This is to remove seeds and pulp from the lemon.
To make the lemon glaze, first add sugar into a small saucepan. Then add in the strained lemon juice.
Using medium heat, stir till just until the sugar dissolved.
Pour into a small bowl and set aside to use as glaze once the muffins are baked.
Glazing Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins:
When the muffins are baked, remove from the oven and leave on a wire rack.
Using a pastry brush, IMMEDIATELY brush the top of hot muffins with the lemon glaze. Then leave to cool a while.
Then remove the muffins from pan and leave to cool completely on wire rack. Can be enjoyed fresh, can be stored a few days or can be frozen till needed as well. So Enjoy!
When grating the lemon zest, only grate the outer yellow skin. Do not grate the white underneath of the lemon as this will be bitter taste.
You can also use chia seeds, instead of poppy seeds.
Lemon zest tends to form clumps in the muffin batter. so be sure to mix the lemon zest in the sugar to prevent clumps. Also the sugar will absorb all the lemon flavour from the lemon zest. Hence will give the muffins more lemon flavour.
When making muffin batter in a stand mixer, always scrap down the sides and bottom of the bowl as much as needed to make sure everything gets all mixed together.
When mixing flour mixture in the batter, always start mixer on low speed to prevent flour mixture from coming up. Do not overmix. Otherwise this will result with tough muffins.
This muffin batter is meant to be thick. A thicker, stiffer muffin batter makes for a tall, puffy, bakery-style muffin and no flat-topped muffins .
When making lemon glaze, just heat up sugar and lemon juice over medium heat just until the sugar dissolved. You can also make the lemon glaze in a microwave oven. Just heat the sugar and lemon juice for about 20 seconds and give it a stir.
The lemon glaze will impart an extra lemon flavour to the muffins and also keep the muffins nice and moist. So they store well.