The Glorious Muffin Recipe - make and add WHATEVS!

I am going to share the easiest muffin recipe in the world, nay the galaxy, with you. Why do I do this, possibly opening the culinary culture up to appalling mutant muffin creations? Why? I do it in the name of adventure, in the name of experimentation, in the name of all that is good and right. Make your weird muffins, baked foodstuff lovers, make them. Steer clear of dung though. Even dung with ganache. We love imaginative combinations in muffin format, but we are not coprophagous.

This really is an excellent recipe, it tolerates all sort of additions, the only thing to be wary of is if you are changing the ratios of wet to dry ingredients significantly. Example: if you want to make banana and passion-fruit muffins, then you are adding two liquidy ingredients. Reduce the amount of milk a little bit, or take it easy when adding the milk and when you get a good consistency cease your milk adding. I'll elaborate more on consistency later. 

Zest for life

This lemon zest is a day old, seems ok though. It's a day old because I started making this recipe yesterday. I got everything organised and then plans changed. As they do with children. So the zest had a little trip to the fridge, where it got to meet the cheese and the olives. As far as I know they all got along ok.

My cooking was accompanied by some duress, in the form of Gabriel. He was very interested by the cherry tomatoes on the bench and although he refuses to eat them he is perfectly happy to ejaculate the contents all over the kitchen. A cheery tomato is like an antipersonnel scatter mine, no one is spared. 

I am making apple and lemon muffins today, this is the first time that lemon and apple will meet in a muffin setting under my roof and I'm excited and worried, just as things should be on a first date. 

Recipe: (from my trusty Woman's Weekly Cafe cakes book)

2 1/2 cups of SR flour

90gms of butter chopped

1 cup castor sugar

1 1/4 cups of butter milk (I never use butter milk, I use regular bobs your uncle cows milk. How do they milk butter anyways)

1 egg beaten lightly 

Whatever you wants to add!In this case 2 apples peeled and chopped and the zest of one lemon.

Preheat the oven to 200 cel and grease a muffin tin or pop cupcake papers in there. I generally always work with cupcake papers as there is a bit less cleaning up to do afterwards. Marginally less.

Rub the butter and flour together until it is lovely and mixed, I always soften it a bit in the microwave, but if you are a butter rubbing purist then leave that step out. 

Add the cup of castor sugar and any other DRY ingredient that you are adding, like dried fruit, choc bits and non juicy type fruit. 

I made a decision to add my lemon zest and two chopped apples to the milk and egg. I often mix the egg and milk together when I know I will use all of the milk.If you are interested I used Golden Delicious apples. Because they were getting a bit old. Not old persons home old, more like, lawn bowls old.

            Cutted up apples                               Apples, milk, egg and zest

                                

So yeah, if you were going all dry with your ingredients then add the wet stuff now. The mix should be wet through, but not dripping off the spoon. Mine was hanging together nicely.

Spoon into the muffin tin, I always fill to the top of the papers and a bit more, because I like muffin tops. Not that bit of circular fat that rolls over jeans that are too tight, but the actual lovely mushroom shaped top of the muffin. A while ago I noticed that Muffin Break were just selling muffin tops, so I'm guess I'm not alone. I mean, I am ultimately alone, of course, we all are, that's something to get used to, but in liking muffin tops, I believe that I have supporters.

       Add that amount. Exactly.            Mmm, bakedy goodness. 

 

They smell lovely when they cook, filling the house with a 1950's bonhomie. I sometimes wear my frilly apron when I cook and this makes me feel extra housewifely. Unfortunately I always start to want to hop into the sherry, and look longingly out the window at the black gardener. 

Gabe was dead excited to try one and then took a bite and said "I don't like it". Despite being initially a bit hurt I remembered that he had recently gone from wanting to be Rapunzel to wanting to be Ariel. So frankly I am not putting any stock into the opinion of a little boy that wants to be a mermaid. 

 

And that is that. I ate one of the muffins and whilst enjoying it, I wasn't lifted into sensory heaven. My most preferred combination is chocolate and berries and also plain old apple by itself. The lemon and the apple weren't getting as long as well as I had hoped, I suppose that the cultural differences were just too great.