Apple Muffins with Cinnamon Butter

Today I made the most delicious apple muffins using this recipe and we ate them warm with cinnamon butter. To make the cinnamon butter I used about 100g of butter, mixed with 60g of icing sugar with 1 1/2 teaspoons of cinnamon. It was amazing, although probably a bit too much for the number of muffins I made!

I used my lovely new silicone muffin trays that Ian bought me as a surprise sale present, and I didn't use cases. I think that would have been fine if I had let the cakes cool down before trying to extract them, but as we wanted to eat them hot I think it would probably have been wiser to use cases. As my new muffin trays are extra-deep ones I am going to experiment with making my own cases out of greaseproof paper next time I make these.

I recommend you all try baking these asap - but best done when you have people round, as they are EXTREMELY moreish and otherwise you might end up eating the whole batch on your own!

Baking - Chocolate Guinness Cake

Sorry about the poor quality picture - and the fact the cake is already cut - we just couldn't wait to eat it!

This recipe is from my all-time favourite Baking book, 'Baking Magic' by Kate Shirazi. If you are after a not-too-sweet, dense, moist and chocolatey loaf, this one's for you - in my opinion it would make a great grown-up and manly birthday cake for any Dads and Grandads out there!

110g butter, 1 1/3 cups soft brown sugar, 2 eggs, 3/4 cup Guinness, 1 1/4 cup plain flour, 1/2 cup cocoa powder, 1tsp bicarb, 1/2 tsp cream of tartar (mums will have this in their cupboards to make playdough, but I haven't actually used it to bake a cake before!)

Preheat oven to 180 degrees. Line a 1lb Loaf Tin (I use a silicone liner I got from the pound shop).

Cream butter and sugar, then beat in eggs. Add Guinness.

Sift dry ingredients in and mix to combine.

Bake for  about 45 minutes (mine actually took a little longer) until the skewer comes out clean.

Eat.

Also good warmed up in the microwave and served with ice cream for pudding. Yum.

Pineapple and Raisin Muffins

I bought some pineappple since Harry LOVED it as a snack at the children's centre - guess what? He has now decided that he doesn't like it. Luckily I found a very tasty recipe to adapt in Annabel Karmel's Baby and Toddler Meal Planner. The lady who moved out of our house very kindly left this book for me when she moved out as she realised I had one toddler and a baby on the way. Archie is now nearly 6 months, but we are expecting to follow the Baby Led Weaning style of weaning, so the puree ideas aren't much use to us. I'm glad I had a look in the book though, as towards the end I found some great baking recipes.

Annabel Karmel's recipe uses carrot, but as we aren't big vegetable eaters (bad mummy - we usually stick to the frozen stuff), I didn't have any in and substituted coconut. I don't have a picture. Ian suggested I just put in a photo of different muffins, shame on him!

4oz Plain Flour
4oz Plain Wholemeal Flour
1 tsp Baking Powder
3/4 Bicarb
1 tsp Cinnamon
1 tsp Ginger
1/2 tsp Salt
6 fl oz Vegetable Oil
3oz Caster Sugar
2 eggs
4oz Coconut
8oz (225g) Canned Pineapple, drained
4 oz Raisins

Preheat Oven to 180degC
Sift together dry ingredients.
Beat wet ingredients in a separate bowl, smush up the pineapple if you have it in chunks.
Mix the wet and dry ingredients - remember not too much mixing, just enough to combine.
Bake for 20-25 minutes.

Yummy and lots of fruit in every bite!

Muffinlicious

Muffins are the order of the day this week! I have really been enjoying playing with recipes I have found to match to the ingredients in my cupboard, and I think I hit gold this morning. Nothing like baking first thing in the morning so you can have something yummy for a (second) breakfast! (Can you tell I have a 5 month old early riser?!) I find these muffins are nice in the morning as they aren't super sweet, unlike your traditional cupcake which is more of an afternoon tea delicacy.

Cinnamon and Raisin Oaty Muffins

1/2 cup rolled oats
1 cup raisins
1/2 cup boiling water
1 2/3 cups SR flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
2/3 cup milk
6 tbsp sunflower oil
1 tsp Cinnamon

For the tops
2 tbsp soft brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon (or to taste)

Preheat Oven 200 Celsius

Put raisins, oats and boiling water into a bowl. Leave to soak.

Combine flour, baking powder, cinnamon and sugar. Sift.

Mix the sugar and cinnamon for the tops of the cakes, put to one side.

Add eggs, milk and oil to the oats mixture. Lightly beat to combine.

Add wet mix to dry mix. Carefully fold until just combine. Dollop into muffin cases.

Sprinkle the cinnamon sugar on to the tops of the muffins.

Bake for 15-20 minutes.

Scoff. Bet you don't stop at one.

Super Tasty Healthy Muffins!

After my exertions for our Hallow'een party I was rather butter-creamed out (I know, I can hardly believe it myself!) and my usual sweet vanilla cupcakes were not really inspiring me to bake - I also had a friend around who recently commented that her little girl was 'getting a sweet tooth', which left me thinking about how my baking habits might be affecting my lovely little man, who is always extremely appreciative of my efforts (unless they are savoury - see Pizza Pinwheels as an example!). So this week I decided to go for something a little more healthy. I had some bargain bananas bought for us by my sister when she was visiting that needed using up, so I adjusted a recipe for banana and white chocolate muffins that I found in my trusty Baking Magic cookbook - I really recommend this book for anyone wanting to bake cakes and cookies!

Here is my recipe:
1 cup plain flour
1 cup wholemeal flour (you can just use 2 cups plain if you prefer)
1 tbsp baking powder (yes, tablespoon!)
2/3 cup milk
1 egg, beaten
1/2 cup sunflower oil
3 small ripe bananas
handful of fresh berries - I used raspberries and blueberries

Preheat oven to 200 centigrade. Grease/line muffin tray.

Combine the flour and baking powder and sift. This is really important!

In a separate bowl (I did this in the KitchenAid) combine sugar, milk, egg, oil and bananas. Mix in the berries.

Stir together until just combined. DO NOT OVER MIX! A rubber spatula is best for folding in econmically and quickly. You need to keep in the sifted air from your flour.

Spoon big dollops into the pan. Don't worry about being tidy, these aren't delicate little cupcakes, they are big, floury, airy muffins.

Bake for 15-20 minutes. Yum. Great for breakfast!

Hallow'een Party!

We had a brillinat time yesterday with our Hallow'een party. We invited Harry's NCT buddies(3 other children, J, E and A) and their parents. This included baby S who is only 7 days old today! So tiny, I can't even remember when my snuggly little bear was that tiny and it was only 5 months ago! We also invited our next door neighbour, G who is 16 months and came with his daddy.

The older toddlers had a grand old time playing with balloons and toys in the lounge, they were really good and as there were lots of adults we were able to take playing with them in turn. Meanwhile other adults chatted in the kitchen, eyeing up the buffet!

We decided not to do any organised games this year, as, in my opinion they are a little young at 2 1/2. We did, however, have sparklers (for the adults to hold) at the end of the evening and they enjoyed a run around the darkening garden.

On to the food...
I made spooky spider chocolate cupcakes with a minty buttercream icing:

Pumpkin cupcakes - these were supposed to be ACTUAL pumpkin cakes from the hummingbird recipe book, but I failed at making roast pumpkin puree so they were vanilla with orange glace icing and a small green buttuercream stalk.

Gingerbread skeletons - recipe courtesy of Mama Owl and including baby skeletons decorated by Ian!

 

Shaped sandwiches (ham bats, tuna spiders and cheese ghosts)

Sausage spiders - These are simply half a sausage taken out of its skin and rolled into a ball with half-twiglets for legs! I used to make these as a kid and they are really effective!

We also had spooky crisps and some un-spooky pizza, breadsticks and other bits and pieces.

The party was a great success, Harry was so excited to be dressed up, even though he is usually extremely reluctant to do anything like that. We bought some light up balloons and sent the children home with one each as well as some baked goods (I fear I made have over baked!) and it was great to catch up with all the NCT group. I was pleased that we didn't invite too many more people (although I would have loved my friend's lovely girls H and J to come - unfortunately they were away). I think the number we had was a great number for our house!


I definitely hope to have another Hallow'een party next year! It is such a fun celebration to enjoy with your kids. Maybe I have posted this in time to be some inspiration for someone - have a great Hallow'een!

Cakes

Another of our favourite activities is to make cakes - this is a dual purpose activity - we can make them AND eat them! Harry particularly likes using the new 'cement mixer' - KitchenAid. Let's hope he doesn't try to make actual cement in it :-/

First there is the measuring. I like to use recipes in cups because I think it's a little easier to understand. Harry can read all of his numbers up to 12 so he can help to read the recipe now which is lovely. He's not that dextrous at getting things into the bowl though, as you can see from the picture...

 

I did have a picture here of Harry licking the paddle (another key part of cake baking, I'm sure you all agree) but being the camera novice I am I couldn't figure out how to rotate it!

Once the cakes are in the oven, it's time to do some washing up...

...and to clean down the side. I'll be honest, I had to do it again after he'd finished, but he did a good job for a 2 year old and it kept him busy for the 10 minutes they were cooking!

Finally time to scoff a cake (and gloat at the baby who isn't allowed one...)

Neopolitan Cake

Firstly, I'd like to apologise because I got my inspiration for this cake from a blog I read the other day, but I can't for the life of me remember which blog it was! So if it was yours, or you know whose it was, please comment and I will edit this post.

Edited: The blog I was looking for was  The Organised Penguin - also looks like this is where I first saw Lakeland's Duo Piping Bags I link to below - so thanks on both counts :-)

So, I read this amazing blog post about neopolitan cupcakes and I thought YUM! Off I went to the shop to buy pink colouring and strawberry flavouring - I had everything else I needed. I really *should* have visited the local cake decorating shop to buy my colour as I usually buy the gel colouring from there when I want to colour cakes. I find that the liquid colour you can usually pick up in supermarkets is OK for icing but you can never get a vibrant cake colour with it. However, I was pleasantly surprised when I nipped into Tesco to find Silver Spoon 'Colour Creator' in pink (and lilac, which I might well be going back for - another step in getting all my rainbow colours!) for just 79p. That's a lot cheaper than the gel stuff I usually buy.

Making this cake was a great excuse to use the magnificent KitchenAid, which whizzes up cake batter in a matter of seconds, enabling you to grease trays, lay out cupcake cases and begin tidying up whilst your cake mix is getting beaten. I chucked in all the ingredients - I'm a bit lazy and tend to use a VERY easy recipe from Baking Magic by Kate Shirazi - I even use the 'cups' version as it's even easier - I have these amazing russian doll cup measurers from Fred I got for a present once. That company is a great one to turn to for funky kitchen gadgets if you ever need a present for someone who likes baking/cooking!

After whizzing up the mix (as I said I am a lazy baker and figure extra whizzing makes up for things like sieving the flour - I don't think I am GBBO material just yet ;-) ) I separated it out into 3 parts, adding a spoonful of cocoa powder to one, vanilla essence to another and both strawberry flavouring and pink colour to the third.

I decided that instead of cupcakes I would make the cake in a loaf tin to add to the 'neopolitan' style. I carefully spooned the mix into the tin in stripes. I added the cocoa first as the mix was firmest due to the added cocoa (this recipe does give quite a firm cake batter, which helped), then the vanilla, then the strawberry. GBBO-ers would no doubt have fished out the piping bag to make this step a little smoother. As you can see, in typical lazy baker style I am using a silicone liner to save me from having to grease the tin.

My only problem was timing the bake. I find that loaf cakes take so much longer than you expect to cook - and this usually makes me turn bake to my trusting cup cakes or tray bakes which cook in about 12 minutes. I seemed to be waiting forever for this one.

It turned out looking quite good, although as you can see from the picture I clearly didn't split my mix quite evenly. The cake itself was also a little dense, although I think that was my fault for not beating it enough. This was my first time using the KitchenAid to make cakes, so that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

I think it would look great with nice tidy piped rows of buttercream icing on top, but decorating is not my forte really. Especially as this was just an experiment to be eaten at home - not sure we really need the extra sugar to be honest! Later I made cupcakes which turned out much lighter and still had a really good effect but what I really need to get my decorating on is one of the Lakeland Duo Piping Bags - or ideally for this bake one that does 3 colours - how cool would that look!