These are particularly good: nothing fancy (I hate a breakfast muffin that thinks it’s a cake), but the pear keeps the texture luscious and the ginger permeates everything, including your kitchen, with its husky heat. This makes for the kind of Saturday breakfast I can happily settle into. And I’m pretty keen on a quick snack later on in the day of one of these now-cooled muffins with some sharp, hard cheese, a Davidstow Cheddar maybe or Caerphilly, or a crumbly, pungent blue.

You can mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl, and the wet ones in a jug, cover both with clingfilm, and leave the former in a cool spot in the kitchen and the latter in the fridge. Then all you have to do is peel and chop the pear and lazily fork everything together in the morning. I dare say you will not get punished from on high if you don’t bother to peel the pear, either. I do, simply because I love the way the juicy fruit merges with the crumb when there are no barriers to its oozing.

Makes 12

250g flour

2 tsp baking powder

150g caster sugar

75g light brown sugar, plus ½ tsp per muffin for sprinkling

1 tsp ground ginger

1 x 142ml pot sour cream

125ml vegetable oil

1 x 15ml tbsp honey

2 eggs

1 large pear such as a Comice (or other fruit to give you about 300g in weight), peeled, cored and cut into 5mm dice

1 Preheat the oven to 200°C/Gas 6 and line a 12-bun muffin tin with muffin papers.

2 Measure into a bowl the flour, baking powder, caster sugar, 75g of brown sugar and the ground ginger.

3 In a large measuring jug, whisk together the sour cream, oil, honey and eggs and then fold into the dry ingredients.

4 Lastly, mix in the diced pear, and divide the batter evenly between the muffin cases.

5 Sprinkle each one with ½ tsp of brown sugar and bake for 20 minutes. Remove to a cooling rack. Best eaten while still a little warm.

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