Versatile Muffin/Cake Recipe

I always make muffins at Hallowe'en for either (sometimes both) my daughter's class or troop at Girl Guides. I know I have posted this recipe before, but I don't think I ever mentioned that it is the same versatile recipe that I have used for other occasions, just changing the ingredients slightly. So here I am stating the other possible ingredients!

3 cups flour [I usually do approx 2 cups white & 1 cup coarse ground]
2 tsp baking soda [same as bread soda]
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground clove
4 eggs
2 cups sugar [I usually mix brown & white]
1 ½ cups sunflower oil
1 tsp vanilla
**2 cups {approx} grated carrot OR crushed pineapple OR smushed banana OR apple sauce OR pumpkin mush [OR combination, for instance when making “Hawaiian” I whiz up 1 can of pineapple with 2 mushed bananas and infuse the cake with some rum before frosting!]

OPTIONAL:  walnuts, pecans, raisins

1. Preheat oven to 350 F/180 C
2. In a large bowl mix together flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, & spices
3. In another large bowl beat together eggs & sugar; then beat in oil & vanilla.  Slowly stir in dry ingredients, then fold in fruit or veg mush.  Add nuts or raisins last, if using.
4. Grease & flour bundt cake tin, or other large tin IF making a cake.  If making muffins, put muffin cases in deep muffin tin.  For cake bake approx 1 hr 10 mins or until tester comes out dry; for muffins the time is between 15 –  20 mins depending on the size of the muffin tin.

NB this is a large recipe, for 1 large cake (like a bundt), a sandwich cake or about 5 dozen standard size muffins (less if making large muffins, more if making small muffins!).

For cakes I tend to make a butter frosting (butter, icing sugar, small amount boiled water, vanilla, food coluring) but for muffins it is simple enough to frost with a glace frosting (small amount of boiled water, icing sugar, vanilla, food colouring). I don't have a cake decorating kit, but a zip-lock bag with a cut corner serves as a squeezy sack for coloured frosting to decorate (the smaller the cut corner, the finer the decorative line).

Xmas Nibbles!

There have been a number of things that I normally make at xmas that I have not done or plan to do this year, but that hole left has made me want to make things that I have not made recently, to try them out again as an entertaining treat. 

With this in mind, I thought I would try out some edible "straws". I made chocolate straws and pesto straws for a "cousins and cocktails" night a number of years ago and the sweet and savoury treats were a hit. So I thought it was time I tackled the more well known "cheese straws" (of which the chocolate straws and pesto straws are simply a variation). They are easy to make with simple ingredients: cheese (I use a mix of mature cheddar & parmesan), Jus-Roll puff pastry, and a beaten egg for finishing. 

The puff pastry brand I use (Jus-Roll) contains two rolls of ready made pastry (if you make your own from scratch, good on ye, but I am going for party convenience!), which is ideal for making both a sweet and a savoury snack. Roll out according to packet instructions, on a lightly floured surface; here I also include a sprinkling of parmesan to become embedded in the pastry while rolling. Put handfuls of cheese on half the rolled pastry, then fold, roll out again and add another layer of cheese.

With a sharp knife cut the rolled pastry into strips.

Carefully take one strip at a time and twist before placing on a baking sheet, which is already prepared with a surface of parchment or wax paper. The straws always want to move around and untwist on the sheet. Be patient with them; try twisting tighter than you want them to be and you may end up with the twist you want. Actually, it doesn't really matter -- they taste great and each one looks individual when baked. Divide the beaten egg into two dishes so that you can have one specifically for the savoury and the other sweet. To finish the straws, loosely brush on some beaten egg. Sprinkle some more parmesan over the straws before putting in the oven.

Bake in the centre of the oven about 10 minutes at around 180C.  Cool before removing from tray; they can be eaten warm or cold. They also freeze well, though make sure they are in a sturdy container as they are delicate pastry. The yield is pretty good: two and a half dozen at least from the single pastry roll. Tip: only bake one tray at a time for even cooking; prepare the other trays when the first is in the oven -- it is still pretty quick.

The same process is done for making the chocolate straws. Roll out the pastry on a lightly floured surface, spread chocolate on one half of the pastry, fold, repeat, cut into strips, twist. Note: since this is a sweet snack, sprinkle sugar on the surface with the flour so that it gets embedded into the pastry dough while rolling!

Again, brush the straws loosely with beaten egg.

For the finishing touch, sprinkle the straws with more sugar before putting into the oven.

I prefer the savoury straws myself, but anyone who likes sweets will love these!

Hallowe'en!

As well as all the excitement of carving pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns every October,

it is the season for me to take out last year's pumpkin mush from the freezer and make a few batches of muffins. These get decorated as jack-o-lanterns too and get sent into school and/or Girl Guides with my daughter for her and her friends. If I have enough mush, I can make additional batches of muffins for sharing around elsewhere.

So after Hallowe'en night, the carved pumpkins get chopped and peeled and cut up into small cubes or rectangles.

A large orange (or several small ones or clementines) and a lemon are peeled and juiced. The juice and a tiny bit of water are added to the pot of pumpkin cubes (the pumpkin release a lot of water when cooking). The peel is cut into slivers

and added to the pot. Cook this gently on low-medium heat, stirring periodically, in a large heavy-bottomed saucepan.

When all the pumpkin is cooked, it is soft enough to be mashed. Tilt the pot a bit to see how much liquid there is; if there is a lot of liquid, raise the heat to boil some of it off,

The pumpkin mush needs to be moist in order to give moisture and flavour to future pumpkin muffins. I will give the recipe for the muffins in another post, but if you can't wait, use pumpkin mush in the same recipes that you use for carrot cake or banana bread. Compare the picture below to the picture above to get an idea of how much liquid should not be left in the final mush.

I packed the mush into equal size freezer bags. In the past I have used weights of 350 g and 500 g, which also work fine in my recipes for muffins, and also in pumpkin pie (I'll give a recipe for that in a future post too). So it is a little bit random that these packs are 450 g but I figured it was a reasonable amount when I was packing and weighing. I put the 3 bags of mush into an additional freezer bag but will only use one bag at a time. One bag of mush will happily be used in a recipe that makes about 5 dozen small muffins or 2 pies.