We study the asymptotic behaviour of solutions to a quasilinear equation with high-contrast coefficients. The energy formulation of the problem leads to work with variable exponent Lebesgue spaces Lpε (·) in a domain Ω with a complex microstructure depending on a small parameter ε. Assuming only that the functions pε converge uniformly to a limit function p0 and that p0 satisfy certain logarithmic uniform continuity conditions, we rigorously derive the corresponding homogenized problem which is completely described in terms of local energy characteristics of the original domain. In the framework of our method we do not have to specify the geometrical structure Ω. We illustrate our result with periodical examples, extending, in particular, the classical extension results to variable exponent Sobolev spaces.