3-Ingredient Strawberry Muffins Recipe

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Freshly baked muffins are a delight to wake up to. Preparing them, though, requires a long list of ingredients, a few bowls to clean, and up to an hour's worth of time. By using boxed mixes, you can basically cut the typical muffin ingredient and time necessities in half, and take advantage of premixed dry ingredients that can be combined with wet ingredients in one single bowl. As if that wasn't easy enough, you can shorten the recipe further by swapping the eggs and milk for yogurt, a creamy saturated fat that adds moisture to the batter in a similar way, taking the place of egg whites, milk, or oil.

In this three-ingredient strawberry muffin recipe written with developer Michelle McGlinn, yellow cake mix is combined with strawberry yogurt and strawberry preserves to make a 20-minute muffin that comes together in just one bowl. The strawberry flavor is fresh and bright without being artificial, and the muffins are light and fluffy even without the addition of milk and eggs. Easy enough to make even on the busiest mornings, these muffins are the shortcut recipe you need for sweet breakfasts any day of the week.

The only ingredients you'll need for this recipe are yellow cake mix, strawberry yogurt, and strawberry preserves. You can swap the yellow cake mix for white or even strawberry, keeping in mind that this will change the color of your muffins. Choose a full-fat yogurt, which will add more moisture to the muffins, and a high-quality strawberry jam or preserves so that the strawberry filling tastes sweet and fresh (we happen to love Trader Joe's fresh strawberry preserves) . You can even make your own strawberry jam using fresh strawberries, if desired.

Preheat oven to 350 F.

In a bowl, mix the cake mix and yogurt together until very well combined.

Scoop the mix into a muffin tin lined with paper liners, filling each just under halfway.

Add 1 teaspoon of strawberry preserves into each scooped muffin.

Top with the remaining batter to fill.

Bake the muffins for 18-20 minutes, or until a toothpick poked into the centers comes out clean.

Let the muffins cool slightly on a wire rack, then serve.

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Strawberry preserves are a great way to have a burst of jammy texture inside of your muffin, but you can also swap it for other textures and flavors, too. For example, you can simply swap the preserves for fresh strawberries, sliced thinly and placed throughout the batter. This will be less sweet and jammy, but more fresh and chewy, the strawberries not softened by the preserving process. You can also swap for a different fruit like raspberries or use raspberry or blackberry preserves, which will be a little more tangy than sweet strawberries.

You can also opt instead for a crumb filling and topping, similar to a streusel. To do this, combine flour, brown sugar, white sugar, and cold butter to make a crumbly topping, then add to the tops of the muffins before baking. You can also fill the muffins with the streusel the same way as the strawberry jam, filling the cups halfway and adding the mixture before topping. If you have an extra box of cake mix, you can shortcut the streusel by using that, or make it even easier by using store-bought granola.

Is there a difference between muffins and cupcakes? With boxed mixes it can be hard to differentiate. Though both cupcakes and muffins are single-serving versions of batter-based foods, muffins are bread-based while cupcakes are cake-based. This means that these muffins, made with cake mix, are a fluffier, lighter crumb than a typical muffin and could even qualify as a cupcake. Of course, another major difference between the two is the topping: Cupcakes are frosted, while muffins are left plain or with a crumb. Since these are not frosted, you could consider them a light and airy muffin, similar to a Jiffy mix.

If you do want muffin texture, which is dense and bread-like, you can swap the cake mix for muffin mix. Using a muffin mix such as blueberry, combine the mix with 1 ½ cups yogurt, adding more yogurt if the batter looks dry. Combine fully, then scoop and fill the muffins as written, leaving out the blueberries that come with the packaged mix.

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