Posted by Emily  Print Recipe

Well, summer is almost over and strawberry season has ended, and every time I go to the grocery store they always seem to be having a sale on their strawberries, obviously trying to get rid of them as fast as possible. But looking closely at the strawberries, many are bruised or mushy and just don’t look that great. Definitely not something I’d want to display on a strawberry tart. But I have a hard time passing up such a good deal, so I buy these sad looking strawberries and immediately freeze them when I get home for use in smoothies or granita.

But sometimes this means I’ll look in the freezer and see that I have way too many strawberries. I came upon this recipe a while ago when I was looking for a recipe to use up some of these strawberries. It’s pretty much the easiest recipe in the world. You mix up the wet ingredients, including the strawberries, in a blender and combine that with the dry ingredients and you’re done. It’s takes about 5 minutes to make these.

And they are light (184 calories, 4g of fat), which is nice if you’re trying to watch your weight but still want a treat. If I hadn’t known they were supposed to be light, I wouldn’t have been able to tell. It seems like they reduced the amount of butter from a normal muffin recipe, but these are still very moist and sweet. You could probably health them up even more by substituting all or some of the flour with whole wheat flour.

I honestly have no complaints about this recipe. It’s insanely easy, it’s fast, it’s light, it tastes good. What more could you want? I did modify the original recipe and used lemon rind instead of orange. I did this mainly because I had lemons in the fridge, not oranges. I’m sure they would taste just as good with orange rind.

Strawberry-Lemon Muffins

adapted from Cooking Light, May 1999

Ingredients

• 1 1/4 cups strawberries, halved (thawed if frozen)
• 3 tbsp. butter or margarine, melted
• 2 tsp. grated lemon rind
• 2 large eggs
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 1/4 cups sugar
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt

Topping:

• 2 tsp. sugar

Process

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees (F).

2. Mix strawberries, butter, lemon rind and eggs in a blender. Don’t over-process, you only need to blend for about 15-30 seconds or until the ingredients are just mixed.

3. Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl. Pour in strawberry mixture, stirring just until moist.

4. Spoon batter into 12 muffin cups coated with cooking spray. Sprinkle with sugar. Bake for 20 minutes or until muffins spring back when touched lightly in center. Remove from pan immediately.