Starbucks Lemon Muffin

The Starbucks Lemon Muffin costs £4.00 and carries 511 calories with 42g of sugar and 73g of carbohydrate. A lemon flavoured muffin, usually finished with a sugar glaze.

73g of carbohydrate is the highest of any muffin and second in the Bakery case only to the cinnamon bun at 76g, though the two arrive there by opposite routes. The bun gets its figure from flour and carries 5.7g of fibre with it; this one gets much of its own from sugar, at 42g, and carries 2.2g of fibre, the lowest of the three muffins.

Sugar is doing double duty in a lemon bake, which is why the figure runs high. Lemon juice is sharp enough that a batter needs considerably more sugar to balance it than a vanilla or berry one does, and any glaze on top is sugar in its purest form. The muffin tastes less sweet than the chocolate version while carrying nearly as much.

A glaze is the detail that varies most between stores and it is not in the published figures as a separate line. Some batches arrive with a thin lemon icing set on top, others with a sugar crust baked on. The 42g of sugar covers the muffin as sold, so a heavily glazed one is not carrying extra beyond that number, but it will taste considerably sweeter.

Saturated fat at 2.7g is very low, second only to the blueberry muffin, since oil rather than butter is standard for the format and there is nothing here adding cocoa butter or cream.

Zest rather than juice is what gives a good lemon bake its flavour, and it is worth knowing why. The aromatic oils sit in the skin, not the juice, and they survive an oven where the acidity of juice mostly bakes away. A lemon muffin that tastes faintly of nothing has been made with juice alone.

The declared allergens are soya, egg, wheat and milk, with nothing published on diet. Prices reach £4.70 on delivery. The blueberry muffin is the lighter fruit option at 485 calories.