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.

Friday's early morning blackcurrants

In normal circumstances I am not an early riser (I'm more of an average riser), but I've been having problems with pain waking me up so rather than stay in bed and be annoyed about not being asleep I decided to get up and do something productive. And that something productive would be some baking. I had acquired some more blackcurrants from one of my colleagues and we had all had a rather fraught week at work so some Friday treats featuring these would be in order.

 

The thing that I really wanted to do with these blackcurrants was a cheesecake, but this would not be suitable for work place snacking, and it would probably be a bit ambitious for these unaccustomed early hours. Instead I would make some muffins, blackcurrant with some sort of cheesecake feature. This should theoretically be a simple combination of summer fruit muffins and chocolate cheesecake muffins – without the chocolate. The concept of blackcurrant and chocolate appeals to me but I wasn't sure that it would universally popular.

 

The most annoying part of the process was preparing the blackcurrants, getting rid of all the little woody bits from the ends of them. From my previous experience of dealing with blackcurrants I didn't even bother trying to do this with a knife and went straight to plucking with my (clean) fingers. The recipe called for 140g and I had about 300g so I just needed about half of them. To prepare this many took about 20 minutes which is ridiculous when you see how few it actually amounts to.

 

The trick with muffins, I have been led to believe, is to keep the wet and dry ingredients separate until it's time for them to be baked. So before getting on with the main muffin part I did the cheesecake part so that the final assembly could go ahead quickly when the time came. I mixed 110g of soft cheese and 45g of caster sugar which would be distributed to make a filling. Then I mixed the dry ingredients: 280g self-raising flour, 1tsp baking powder and 100g caster sugar. This was less sugar than the recipe called for but I anticipated that the filling would add sweetness and I don't like things too sweet anyway. The wet ingredients consisted of 240ml milk, 90ml vegetable oil and an egg, all beaten together.

 

 

I prepared the muffin tins (although I had to use cupcake cases as I have somehow run out of muffin cases which was a bit annoying as the fit wasn't quite right) and then poured the wet ingredients into the dry. The other trick with muffins, I have been led to believe, is not to over mix – the mixture should be quite runny and a bit lumpy. Finally I quickly stirred through the blackcurrants. I was a bit worried that they would all sink to the bottom when the muffins were baked but there was nothing I could do about that. I quickly filled each case with a tablespoon of muffin mixture, followed by a teaspoon of cheesecake filling mixture, topped with another teaspoon or so of muffin mixture.

 

They baked at 190°C for about 25minutes. The cheesecake filling prevents an accurate skewer test but I'm pretty confident with muffins and they can be relied upon to be done once they look a bit golden. Some of the cheesecake filling had oozed out but to me this looked rather appealing.

 

I packed up enough for one each at work plus some spare for anyone with a big appetite (we all know who!) – leaving a few for Matt and his mum, who was coming round for tea. What I had failed to appreciate was that to top our fraught week off 2 people were on leave, which (when combined with sickness) meant that at 4 people we were down to 50% power. So there were plenty of muffins to go round. Clearly they had some magic in them as we had a remarkably non-fraught day.

 

Maybe I should try this early morning baking more often, and maybe I should try the chocolate / blackcurrant combination with the blackcurrants I've got left.

 

(And in case you were wondering the blackcurrants didn't sink.)

 

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 cake marathon

After a late arrival at my mum and dad’s, a later pizza (my dad is now legendary for these) and an even later night I was not likely to be getting up early to complete this morning’s culinary tasks.

My athletic friend Alex had organised a bake sale to raise money for Farm Africa who she is running the London Marathon for next month. I had possibly been overambitious in my promised offerings: ginger muffins, lemon muffins, marmalade cake and chocolate brownies. Plus a quiz. And some reconstructed “vintage” cake stands.

Knowing that there would be a lot of cake to come this afternoon I skipped breakfast, topped up with caffeine and set to work on the cakes. Today’s bakes were to be tried and tested recipes, not wanting to be too adventurous in someone else’s kitchen. The limited time available, using my mum’s kitchen and her inevitable “help” would be challenge enough. (In fairness my mum’s seemingly continuous washing up was immensely helpful.)

The marmalade cake had to be done early as it needed to cool before icing. I first made this a few weeks ago in response to my glut of marmalade and it was certified a success by my friends Sarah and Andrew, and particularly by their 22 month old son. All went according to plan until it came to line the tin (recipes always say to do this first but I find it boring so don’t bother until just before cooking) and discovered that mum didn’t have the right size cake tin. This is a woman who has two, not insubstantial, cupboards dedicated to bakeware and an extensive baking history. It was not unreasonable for me to assume that she would have a 20cm round tin. We engaged my in some rudimentary mathematics and I was persuaded that I could bake the same volume of cake in two loaf tins.

Two cakes for the price of one into the oven.

While they were cooking I set to work on the lemon muffins. At which point I discovered I didn’t have the ideal ingredients. The basic was possible but I like to add poppy seeds for texture and lemon extract for turbo lemon flavour. So I despatched my husband, Matt, off to the shops.

And meanwhile I put the finishing touches to my cryptic bakes picture quiz. First devised on Thursday evening it needed modifying (apparently some clues were much too hard), adding too (you can never have too many cryptic bake quiz clues), and the answers putting into a visually agreeable format (the cryptic bake quiz makes a very pleasing PowerPoint® presentation). It was just like an assignment where you think that you’ve finished and nearly submit it when you realise that all your references are in a right mess.

Cakes out. Muffins in (but only just with poppy seeds as someone in the shop overheard Matt on the phone telling me that he couldn’t find any and kindly placed some in his basket). Quiz work on-going.

The excellent chocolate brownie recipe was given to me by a friend who doesn’t eat wheat and uses ground almonds rather than flour. It requires four separated eggs. I do not class egg separation as one of my skills. My success rate is usually about 50%. I often enlist Matt to do it for me but he was busy with glue and crockery so I went for it myself. And had 100% success.

Muffins out, brownies in. Quiz work on-going.

I had made two cake stands at home with top of the range super glue but had brought the rest to finish here. Unfortunately I forgot to bring the top of the range super glue. Cue crockery and glue fiasco. Suffice to say only the original two cake stands went to the bake sale.

I delegated Matt the task of icing, which as you know is not something that I relish. He completed this with aplomb whilst I did the next batch of muffins. Mum had baked some gingerbread and I thought that to avoid repetition I ought to go for a different flavour. In a moment of inspiration I decided on white chocolate and cranberry, never tried these before but the muffin recipe is very versatile and it’s usually a good flavour combination. Fortuitously both were available in mum’s randomly stocked kitchen.

Brownies out (smelling divine). Muffins in. Quiz work on-going.

Somehow it was now lunchtime. Still in anticipation of an afternoon of cakey goodness I just had a small mug of soup (I didn’t even have any cheese which is always such a treat at mum and dad’s as there is such a vast selection available). 

Muffins out. Quiz work complete with a little help from dad with the printing. Mad rush to get to the bake sale on.

It was great. Loads of people turned up and I was able to catch up with quite a few friends. And as planned eat lots of cake. I had some almond slice, chocolate biscuit cake, chocolate brownie and I’m sure something else but it slips my mind just now. All delicious. We won an embarrassing number of raffle prizes (but there were loads of prizes). The quiz seemed to be enjoyed and two small boys (who had been keenly selling raffle tickets) certainly enjoyed pressing the buttons for the PowerPoint® presentation. And I got a new spider plant. We used to have a fantastic one with lots of baby spider plants but it died some time ago so hopefully this one will fill that void in my life.

Apparently the event raised nearly £500 – fantastic and really helps Alex on the way to her fundraising target. So inspiring I think I might just plan a bake sale of my own.

Here's the link if you'd like to contribute to Alex's fundraising:

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserPage.action?userUrl=AlexGrounds&faId=281414&isTeam=false