food hits and misses

A lot of my cooking at the moment centres around baby food. Not overly exciting to anyone not involved in getting the small person on to big person foods. One of the benefits is that there's often quite a bit of stuff left over. Today that meant a lot of mashed up apple, just perfect for apple muffins. I cooked about 15 apples - pink lady and granny smiths - with around half a cup of water for 15 minutes. My feeling is about six apples, peeled, cored chopped and sprinkled with water would give you enough apple for the muffins. If you're in a rush or don't have fresh apples on hand, commercial apple sauce would do a more than adequate job.

Apple muffins

1/2 cup butter, melted
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 cups apple mash
1/2 cup caster sugar
2 cups SR flour
1 tspn baking soda
1 tspn ground cinnamon
1 tspn ground cloves

Method

Mix the melted butter and eggs together, stirring well. Add the apple, then sugar and stir thoroughly. Sift together the flour, baking soda and spices. Add to the apple mixture and mix, being careful not to over stir. Place in muffin pans and bake at 180 Celsius for 25 - 30 minutes, until a skewer inserted comes out clean.

Makes 12 medium sized muffins or 9 ludicrously large ones.

When faced with loads of bananas I tend to make cake. It's really one of the easiest cakes I know how to bake - just take a medium rich butter cake batter and add bananas and a bit of bicarbonate soda before the milk and flour. Sadly nobody else in the house seems to like it as much as I do, and I can't eat a whole cake before it goes bad. So this time I decided to make muffins.



They didn't turn out massive, but they did turn out tasty. I guess if you're a big fan of overflowing muffin tops, either make 18 mini muffins or nine mega muffins. I made 12 medium muffins.

Banana muffins

4 bananas
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/2 cup butter, melted
1/2 cup caster sugar'
1 cup chopped walnuts
1 tspn bicarbonate soda
2 cups self raising flour

Method

Mash the bananas and stir in the egg and melted butter. Add the sugar and walnuts and stir well to combine. Sift together the flour and bicarb soda, then add to the banana mix. Stir lightly. Place the batter in muffin cases or a greased muffin tin and bake at 180 degrees C until golden brown - around 25 to 30 minutes. Cool then serve plain or with a dusting of cinnamon sugar.