You Should Always Check the Fridge First...

You know how sometimes, you wake up in the morning and it's just like every other day. The only difference is that you have an urge to make some healthy and delicious muffins? You thought of the frozen berries in the freezer, and checked that you have the yogurt in the fridge the recipe called for and got started. About 20 minutes into making the muffins when the recipe called for the frozen berries, you open the freezer just to find out that your dear boyfriend has eaten them for breakfast. At this point, you blame yourself for not checking the freezer first. Then you smile at the batter and hope that a berry-less mixed berry muffin would taste just as good. (On yeah, but you know they won't be... and they aren't.)

Mixed Berries Muffins

Makes 12 regular sized muffins
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1/3 cup sugar
1 egg
3/4 cup strawberry yogurt
Zest of half a lemon
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole-wheat flour
1/2 cup bran
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 cup frozen or fresh mixed berries (very important ingredient!!!)

1. Preheat oven to 375F. Line a muffin tin with paper liners.
2. Beat butter and sugar with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add in the egg and beat well. Add in the yogurt and zest until well combined.
3. Combine all the dry ingredients and sift half of it over the batter. Mix until combined. Sift the remaining dry ingredients in the batter and mix just until the flour disappears. Fold in the berries.
4. Divide the batter evenly in the 12 muffin liners. They should be about 3/4 full, nothing more.
5. Bake for 25-30 minutes, until tops are golden and a toothpick inserted into the center of muffins comes out clean. Cool on rack!

Possible variations:

1. This recipe could be adopted to create different flavoured fruit muffins. Just swap out the mixed berries with an equivalent amount of  fruit and change the yogurt to another flavour.
2. Strawberry yogurt could be replaced with any other flavour of yogurt or even sour cream. However, if unsweetened alternative is used, a tablespoon more sugar can be added. 
3. If you don't like the grittiness of bran, you could replace it with whole-wheat flour or all-purpose flour.
4. The all-purpose flour in this recipe is to preserve the fluffiness of muffins. If you want you could use all whole-wheat flour. Just remember, the resulting muffin would be slightly denser.