Cheese Muffins

I have been in the mood of muffins this past week. I've already made two kinds of muffins in a week, which was very rare for me to do. I usually only bake at the weekends as a way to treat myself and to withdraw from the usual stuff (work, feed the kitten and cook dinner). My first muffin was lemon muffin, but it was way too lemony for my taste. Turned out that I only put half of the flour needed, that was why. But the second one was meant to be chocolate muffin. I'm normally not a sweet-tooth person but I do crave for some sweetness when I'm PMSing. :P And, like the first one, it was not a chocolate muffin at all. It appeared that my chocolate powder had already expired so I had to throw it away. I thought, ok let's make normal muffin with chocolate chips then. But I couldn't open the choc chip jar!!!! And I wanted muffins. And when I wanted it, I had to have it. So I used the ingredients of the chocolate muffin but using grated cheddar cheese as a filling instead of chocolate. Here goes the recipe (originally from Nigella Lawson's chocolate chip muffin recipe).

Cheese Muffin

Ingredients:

• 1 3/4 cup of all purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons of baking powder (I ran out of baking powder, but it still worked)
• 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
• 3/4 cup of sugar
• 1 cup milk
• 1/3 cup plus 2 teaspoon vegetable oil
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla sugar
• grated cheddar cheese (you can use as little or as much as you want)

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 200° C.
2. Put the muffin cases into the muffin tin.
3. Combine all the dry ingredients together (flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, grated cheese and vanilla sugar).
4. Combine egg, milk and vegetable oil in another bowl and mix them lightly.
5. Pour the wet ingredients to the dry ones and combine until they are just well mixed. Don't overwork or overstir muffins. It's a bad news if you do it.
6. Spoon the muffin batter into the paper cases until just almost reaching the top. You want to give a space to it to rise.
7. Sprinkle some of the grated cheese on top. This will give a nice crunchy cheesy texture.
8. Put in the oven for 20 minutes.

Some ovens work differently with the others. So check out your muffins when it's already 15 minutes. If it's ready (you put a skewer an it comes out clean), take it out.

Yumm....