Tuesday's muffins

Having thus far failed in my social obligation to provide sweet treats to my colleagues following my return from holiday over a week ago I had vowed to make amends for this yesterday. Normally people bring back something from wherever they’ve been but despite visiting quite a few places I didn’t see anything inspiring in terms of locally produced goodies (or at least not that I would be able to get back to the UK without being devoured first) so decided to make muffins.

I popped into my favoured local supermarket on the way home from work to get eggs as I’d used a whole box in the weekend’s lemon meringue pie. Seeing that that was all I went in for I did rather well and also got:

• a loaf of sliced bread – cue toasted sandwiches in the new sandwich toaster which I’d got at a bargain price at my favourite continental style discount supermarket last week 
• 4 tins of strawberries in syrup
• 2 snack packs of premium raisins – ideal as emergency rations in my car

All for under £5, which was good as that was all I had in my purse. I have never bought tins of strawberries before but at 25p each they seemed too bargainous to leave behind. I thought that I would probably be able to adapt a recipe to turn some of them into muffins.

Muffin making would have the bonus effect of keeping me out from under the feet of Matt, my husband, whilst he continued with his DIY project.

I found a recipe for summer fruit muffins. This called for fresh or frozen summer berries but surely the tinned strawberries could be put to good use here. So where the recipe stated 240ml milk I used 240ml of the syrup from the tin. Then I added the fruit that I had chopped up using my favourite method of scissors inserted into the tin. There was a little bit of syrup and a little bit of fruit left over and rather than have these go to waste I mixed them in too. My main concerns were over-sweetness and over-wetness, but I thought that this was a risk worth taking.

I baked them for a little longer than the recipe suggested, hoping to mitigate the risk of over-wetness. They came out of the oven and appeared to be muffin formed rather than one soggy mess. My muffin recipe book is one of the most reliable that I have but since this was an improvised creation the strawberry muffin would need testing. Fortunately Matt was only too happy to help. The feedback was not overwhelming. Adequate but not overwhelming, so these muffins would have to be improved with icing.

In the meantime I moved onto the next batch of muffins: carrot at the special request of my colleague Jan. This is a tried and tested recipe, enhanced by the addition of lots of cinnamon and raisins.

And then the next batch: lemon. Also tried and tested and one of my personal favourites. I find the given recipe not to be lemony enough so I added so lemon juice to the mixture as well as the zest. It suggests that you use lemon essence but since you have to denigrate a lemon to get the zest and then use some of the juice for icing it seemed only logical to use the rest of the juice in the muffins. These have to be iced as soon as they are out of the oven. It’s a simple lemon glacé icing, but I frequently mess it up. This is because when I start to mix it looks like there’s too much icing sugar, so I add more lemon juice, and then it gets too liquid and I lose patience and I just end up pouring this runny lemony syrup all over the muffins. But yesterday I showed an uncommon level of patience and/ or skill and they were rather successfully iced. The only slight problem was that there wasn’t quite enough icing so there were 2 un-iced ones. I didn’t see this as too much of a problem as there are always some people who don’t like icing.

And then the next batch. I went for the relatively safe option of chocolate (for any fussier eaters) but jazzed them up a bit by adding some experimental orange.  Since I’d not done this combination before I used just the zest but I was informed after some more testing (again, Matt didn’t need any encouragement) that they could be more orangey so will add some juice next time. Or maybe make an orangey icing.

At this point I should have got on with making some dinner (well, toasting some sandwiches) but was in the baking frame of mind and wanted to do more icing. I decided that the best thing for the strawberry muffins would be some vanilla icing so had a bit of a trawl on the interweb and found one that looked likely. Determined not to mess this up (icing is not a strong skill) I applied some of the things that I have learnt from previous efforts (this could almost be a CPD entry). The recipe told me to whisk the stuff together. Rather than make a cloud of icing sugar all over the kitchen I mostly blended with a spoon and gave it a quick whisk by hand at the end – I got a nice smooth icing. The recipe told me to use 2 tablespoons of milk. Not wanting to end up with a runny vanilla mess I used only 1 tablespoon – I got a suitably stiff icing. In fact it was of such a consistency that I even ventured to use my icing set. This was only the second time ever that I had used this. On the first occasion it was an absolute disaster so I was a bit nervous but kind of excited at the same time. I chose my nozzle from the selection of 8, loaded the icing bag and then went for it. Even if I say so myself, it was much more successful than the first occasion and I feel rather try rather encouraged to practise a bit more. Maybe I might even use some food colouring. I enhanced the decoration further on a few of the muffins by adding some freeze-dried strawberries.

 

But the icing bag was an absolute mess and I was not in the mood for cleaning it last night so the icing for the carrot cake muffins would have to be spooned on. This was a classic carrot cake icing with cream cheese and is really yummy. I should have made it even better by putting a bit of orange zest into it. But it was still really yummy – I know this because I personally cleaned out the bowl.

That should have been it for the evening. The sandwich toaster had still not been deployed. But Matt emerged from his DIY and suggested that I could make a batch of muffins with some chocolate caramel sweets. We have quite a few packets of these as Matt’s grandad gives them to him when he cuts his toe-nails. So I chopped up the chocolate caramel sweets (easier said than done even with a really sharp knife), added these to a mixture of “basic” muffin, reheated the oven and located another packet of muffin cases. It was pretty obvious that these would taste okay but by the time they were cooked I was hungry (sandwiches still untoasted) and tired so thought it perfectly acceptable to test one myself. It was good.

I was too tired though to risk any more icing. So I sort of cleaned up. Matt made the toasted sandwiches – they were delicious. Much more delicious than if I had made them because he was very generous with the cheese.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of the whole exercise was packing all the muffins into boxes for transfer to mine and Matt’s places of work. This required extraction and redeployment of the camping box (the big plastic box with miniature supplies of tea, coffee, sugar, salt, ketchup etc. from hotels, motorway services etc.).

We divvied up the muffins between us and took them off to work this morning. And the results of this multi-centre, non-placebo controlled, non-blinded muffin trial?:

• our colleagues like muffins
• one participant described the strawberry muffin as “a mouthful of loveliness”
• the chocolate caramel sweet muffins could have done with more chocolate caramel sweets
• the carrot cake muffins were the most popular in all locations. Matt informed me that they had been met with “great acclaim”

Saturday's lemon meringue

My mother-in-law, Barbara, often visits her friends, Peter and Carol, in Cornwall on a Sunday evening. We decided to join her for yesterday’s trip. A gathering of 5 people would surely be a good opportunity to share some baking, and based on some inside information I decided that the baking that I would be sharing would be a lemon meringue pie.

Matt, my husband, was out watching a sci-fi film with his friends on Saturday night; I saw this as the ideal opportunity to tackle the lemon meringue pie. It is a much more complex undertaking than my usual baking because it requires significantly more utensils than my standard efforts and would probably create a lot of mess.

Having shown an uncommon level of planning I had sourced some lemons earlier on in the day. This resulted in my least favourite, but most conveniently located, supermarket becoming even less favoured as a surly youth informed me that “we’re all out of lemons”. So I detoured to a more favoured “local” supermarket where the lemon supply was in no way compromised: one lemon for 35p or 5 for £1.50. I didn’t know how many lemons I needed (I hadn’t done that much planning) but some rudimentary mathematics indicated that the multipack was the most economical option and I was sure that I could find some other uses for lemons if I had any left over.

My granny used to make fantastic pastry, as yet, I’m not as good. This is despite having very cold hands most of the time which is apparently a good thing for making pastry. I suppose that’s kind of irrelevant when you cheat and use a food processor to make the pastry. It seemed to come out of the machine ok, the difficult bit was rolling it out to the required thickness of 3mm. I was not about to start measuring this so I just sort of rolled it quite thin. The main problem was that chunks kept getting stuck to the rolling pin (despite liberal flouring – cue mess creation 1) so it got a bit uneven with a few holes. So I had to do a bit of a patching up job. The first nerve-wracking part of the process was the transfer of the base to the tin, but with a swift movement I managed it without pastry disintegration.

If I was in a hurry I would have been tempted to skip the next stage: chilling the pastry base for 30 minutes. But I wasn’t in a hurry (if I was I probably shouldn’t have embarked upon a lemon meringue pie) and this half hour would be perfect for a quick bit of dinner.

I don’t own any baking beans. I always see them in baking shops, pick them up and then see the price and decide that I can do without them. So I lined my pastry case with raw lentils for blind baking. It’s a funny phrase “blind” baking as I can see through my oven window very well while it’s in there.

While the pastry was baking I set to on the lemon filling. The recipe required 6 lemons. Unfortunately “5” that I had seen on the label of my lemon multipack was actually telling me that lemon counted as a one of my 5 day, not that there were 5 lemons in the pack. So I had only 4 new lemons. Fortunately I found an older lemon in the fridge, plus two very aged limes, altogether I figured that this would be enough citrus. So I zested the fruit (cue mess creation 2 –I tried really hard to get it all into the bowl but the lemon “spray” seems to go all over the place), except for the very aged limes. I used one of my favourite kitchen power tools, the electric citrus juicer, to get as much juice as possible from the fruit, including this time the aged limes which although looked the worse for wear on the outside were quite acceptable on the inside. You add some corn flour to the juice and zest. I find the behaviour of corn flour most peculiar and so mixing it to the required “smooth paste” baffled me. I just kind of gave it a swoosh before adding to some boiling water on the hob and hoped that the mixture would do whatever it was supposed to do.

The next nerve wracking part of the process was egg separation. The filling called for 6 egg yolks. I only had 6 eggs so would need 100% success with the egg separation. Maybe I’m not as bad at egg separation as I give myself credit for as I achieved 6 separated eggs. I think it was because I didn’t have an audience, I’m sure if Matt had been there it would have gone wrong and we’d have had to make an emergency trip to the corner shop for more eggs. Anyway, I whisked up my 6 egg yolks with some sugar and then added this to the mixture on the hob. The recipe says to allow the mixture to cool slightly before you add the eggs and sugar (I presume because otherwise you’d scramble the eggs) but I’m never sure what instructions like “slightly” mean so I took the pan off the hob for 5 minutes or so and hoped for the best. It didn’t scramble so obviously 5 minutes cooling was slightly enough. Then back on to the hob to heat until “thickened”; I didn’t really know what that meant as it already seemed quite thick. So I just let it simmer for 5 minutes or so and again hoped for the best.

If I had been clever and / or confident I would have done some multi-tasking here and made the meringue topping whilst the filling was “thickening”. But I was neither clever nor confident. So didn’t start on the meringue until the lemon filling was safely poured into the pastry case. I was careful to follow the recipe closely for the meringue as I’m particularly inexperienced in making this and I’ve got it in my head that it’s one of those things that can very easily go wrong. And after quite a bit of high speed whisking (cue mess creation 3) it seemed to have met the criteria of “stiff” and “glossy”. So I spooned it over the filling and even went so far as to create a swirly pattern on top.

The next nerve wracking moment would be getting the completed pie out of the oven: this was a lot of effort I had been to and I didn’t want to crash at the last. I was worried about leakage of lemon so had balanced it precariously on a baking tray (trying to avoid making the bottom of my oven any more mucky than it already is). Fortunately it came out smoothly and as a bonus there had been no leakage of lemon during the cooking process. I was not going to risk it further by trying to remove the pie from the tin. That would have to wait until Sunday.

Having completed the pie I was left with a small amount of pastry, quite a lot of lemon filling and 2 egg whites. Not wanting this to go to waste I proceeded with a little improvisation to use it all up. Having followed the recipe closely for the first batch of meringue I decided to experiment for another lot and see what happened if I threw in all the ingredients at once. Neither was I about to dirty another bowl so used the one that I had already used for the meringue. The result of these actions was a mixture that was neither glossy nor stiff. But still I was not going to let it go to waste. So I assembled everything together in a rather haphazard manner in a fairy cake tin. Four of the positions I lined with the remaining pastry, the other 8 would have to be caseless. Then I distributed the egg white and sugar mixture (it would be an untruth to call it meringue) and finished all 12 off with a dollop of the lemon mixture (cue huge mess creation). What resulted after about 20 minutes in the oven can probably best be described as lemon meringue blobs.

But the sugar and egg white mixture had turned into something that resembled meringue (or at least a cross between meringue and marshmallow) and it was very edible.

I packaged up the pie securely for transport down to Peter and Carol’s yesterday. We first enjoyed a game of Smite (kind of a cross between bowls and darts and unsurprisingly I wasn’t very good) in the lovely Cornish sunshine. And then a roast dinner before the lemon meringue pie was unveiled from its aluminium foil. Amazingly it held together when taken out of the tin. Even more amazingly it held together when sliced. And the verdict? “That’s a treat”, Peter declared.

We left them with some for today and brought some back for ourselves. I managed to dissuade Matt from having it for breakfast but we both are very much looking forward to lunch. But first I must tidy up the kitchen