Wednesday's cocktail muffins

I had yet again failed to meet the customary work based requirement of bringing in something nice to eat. The occasion this time was my birthday, and the excuse was a very busy week. Things still hadn't really settled down but I was determined to provide something tasty for our team meeting. The previous evening a friend had come round for dinner and I'd done our now almost classic curry (mushroom, chickpea, sweet potato) and had finished it off with half a tin of coconut milk. So now I had half a tin of coconut milk left over. In my experience there are very few things to do with half a tin of coconut milk.

I had a concept in mind.... a kind of pina colada in cake form. I would need to achieve this before work so time being limited I would stick with muffins as the cake form, I know what I'm doing here. I didn't have a precise recipe but there are lots for sort of fruity muffins which I felt fairly confident that I could adapt.

The usual muffin method applied:

1. Mix the dry ingredients: 280g self raising flour, ½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda, ½ teaspoon salt, 100g caster or granulated sugar.

2. Mix the wet ingredients: 1 egg (beaten), half a 400ml tin of coconut milk (approx – it might have been slightly less), 100g tinned pineapple (chopped up into little bits with kitchen scissors – try not to add too much more liquid or it'll all get rather soggy!), 90ml vegetable oil

3. Mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients: it should look like a lumpy batter, not a smooth dough

4. Transfer to muffin tin and bake: this gave me an opportunity to use the new muffin cases that my mum had bought me for my birthday. She knows how to spoil her little girl – I will only ever buy for myself the plain white ones and recently have been using cupcake cases (rather than muffin cases) which are the wrong shape for my tin but I bought them by accident and refuse to let them go to waste. I finished off by sprinkling a little bit of desiccated coconut over the tops (we have a lot of desiccated coconut for some reason so I'm always pleased to find an outlet.

5. Bake at 190ºC for about 25minutes (until they look golden and pass the skewer test).

I took a risk in taking these to work without conducting a taste test myself. Even Matt, my husband, didn't do a taste test. I was doing well for time so just in case I also made some mincemeat muffins too and some nutty gingerbread ones that I made made whilst waiting for our visitor the previous evening. The pina colada muffins went down particularly well with the female contingent of the team (80%, but 85% of the meeting attendees) and I was assured that they performed both in terms of flavour and texture.

I got to try one myself later that evening as I took all the leftover muffins to our last dancing class of the season, and it really was rather good. Again, it was the ladies who were most forward in testing out my new creation – I suppose it is a fairly feminine flavour of muffin but I'm sure that men would get a lot of enjoyment out of them too if they could overcome their bravado. The others were enjoyed too, in class or at the pub at our end of term gathering. I'd recommend you give mincemeat muffins a go if you would like to serve home-made mince pies but can't be bothered with the pastry. And I think I'll be trying out some more cocktail based muffins as the season demands. These ones could even perhaps have a slosh of coconut liqueur added to them on future occasions.