Muffins, glorious muffins!

Breaking (baking?) news!  The banana bread (or banana brick as it has affectionately become known) worked!  Not in the traditional sense of course (you saw the photo…).  But in terms of one of my aims for writing the blog (excess of baked goods leading to socialising).  Hooray!  A friend came over to sample the fruits of my labour.  She was very polite about it.  She also accompanied me on my longest post-surgery walk to date – all the way down the hill to the big supermarket, where I could buy a muffin tin and cases to try out this promising, low-fat muffin recipe by Jane Hornby…

How it was to make:

• HALLELUJAH!!!  As you can see from the video, I did ALL the mixing for this recipe because I didn’t have to cream any butter and sugar!!!
• As this contained bicarbonate of soda and buttermilk again, I followed the advice from the soda bread experience and did everything very quickly as soon as those two were combined.
• I still had to cook it for much longer than the recipe said – I’m starting to wonder if maybe I always have my oven turned down a bit low.

How it came out: 

Really, really, ridiculously good looking!

• Well, well, well!  These muffins were a triumph!  They rose and didn’t sink at all!
• They even looked quite professional in the smart little cases.
• Excellent taste and texture – not too sweet overall but the extra topping gives a little crunchy sweetness.  The blueberries were yummy.

Personal Progress:

• Baking lessons learnt:
  • I realised while baking this that it was like my previous 3 recipes had got together and had a baby, as it had elements of all of them – entirely by accident!  So I think that having nailed this one, I can put the others to bed and move onto something completely different next time (did somebody say chocolate??!).
• Physical progress (HUGE!):
  • I did ALL the baking this time!
  • I DID ALL THE WASHING UP TOO!!!!  (Lucky boyfriend.)
  • This was all in the morning – that was it for me for the rest of the day.  But still.  Massive progress!

If I can do this then you definitely can!

Banana & Blueberry Muffins – BBC GoodFood

This bake, I have been mostly listening to:

Sing to Me (Acoustic version) – Steven Bryan

Perhaps this is why the muffins turned out so well – I was singing lovingly to them throughout.  Huge thanks to Steven for supporting the blog, it is much appreciated.

Caroline Crimson x