Baking night: Mighty Muffins for Puffins

Ok honestly who feeds puffins? I don't even work in academia.

I made banana muffins & savoury cheese scones/muffins! Post on recipe variation later here's some photos to tempt your taste buds.

The smell is driving me mad despite having a full dinner out! I don't know how many of these would actually make it to work.

Banana Muffins:

I read up on various recipes and here's what I used & did:

Ingredients:

2 large ripe bananas

100-120g Butter (room temp)

100g Brown Sugar (more if you like sweeter - original recipe said 180g, I nearly died from a heart attack. Bananas are generally pretty sweet already)

240 Self rising flour

2/3 tspn of bi-carb soda

1 tspn of vanilla essence or you can use vanilla pod ground/extract

2 eggs

3 tbspn of warmed milk

Method:

1. Add Sugar + Butter, Sp 4, 30 seconds to mix in

2. Add all other ingredients, Sp 4, 25 seconds.

3. Canola spray/grease up muffin trays. Pour in. / otherwise, use little cupcake paper wraps and just pour straight in! No greasing required.

4. Bake for 20 - 25mins on 180C.

5. Leave in tray for 2-4 mins, remove and cool on a cooling rack.

You can probably combine Step 1 & 2 together and have no problems!

I really like Savoury above Sweets. So Savoury Cheese Scones were next.

Ingredients:

Method:

Saturday splendor... I woke up feeling soooo low

I was incredibly traumatised by a very bad night of very little sleep and general unwellness (if that's word). Amazingly I woke feeling worse, I now have lost my voice. So what could I do but make half boiled eggs (soft enough to swallow) for breakfast, sadly I didn't have enough dedication to do this with the TM. I shall endeavour to be more patient and aware without my first cup of espresso.

I bake when stressed... So I started baking. I made the Caprese cake into muffins...

...

The pause is a moment of silence for the poor muffins. I didn't follow the recipe, I had 50g too little of the dark chocolate (why did I think they used to come in 300g blocks?). I added extra cocoa powder, just because I like the heavy cocoa-y taste. Everything else was the same. The muffins were delicious. The moment of silence is for the unshaping that occurred which teaches me one great lesson. ALWAYS clear enough bench space and get two sets of cooling racks! The muffins had huge tops!

I had Vegan Boy coming over for a relaxing movie arvo... and I rushed to get the HOT muffins out of the tray and obviously on hindsight, they unbalanced. Fortunately, rescue-able and edible by family but not presentable for outside company. I only managed to save four un-scathed ones for display/photo.

I will definitely try again soon. They're lovely! And can you tell I'm stressed? It's all the information, learning about TM and also having to talk about it... to virtual strangers. Exciting on one hand but daunting - what if they don't like pasta? what if they don't like custard? (wait, can you tell those were my pet dis-likes?). Ok, I actually love pasta bakes - but for health reasons we've refrained from putting at least 300g of cheese or more on pasta just to make it crispy edged and ecstatically edible. I'm just nervous about it all. Excited, but nervous. Plus I've got the practical training coming up... I've only made slushies - not actual sorbet before.

I also made Mushroom Risotto again for tea/dinner - this is something easily Vegan-ified. Leave out butter & parmesan and you're all good. There's no problems with it being gluggy or too wet cause the TMServer helps rest without burning/sticking.

I added a little extra spice (keep minds clean here people). I added a red chilli at the start when chopping onion and sautee-ing. Then toasted pine nuts on the frying pan and added them to my TMServer filled with a layer of baby spinach. Poured risotto in and used the spatula to mix it up. You get a bit of spice, a bit of pine nutty goodness and the added clean taste of spinach. Yummo!

Oh and added to that to top off, I had frozen 4 bananas and wanted to try the Vegan Banana Ice-cream from the Vegetarian Cookbook. I didn't have macademia nuts, so I used pecan & added a swirl of maple syrup instead of chocolate. It was smooth and the nutty flavour came through.

- Sunday, 9:39 pm -
I have to own up, I tried the ice-cream again today proudly with a good friend. It was more frozen, and she mentioned the nut oil flavour have gotten a lot stronger and maybe was off. I'm not sure if it's because I have the peel on the pecan or I didn't re-toast them... they didn't taste off when I bit into one before adding to the banana mix.  Sadly I will never know. It was a pre-packed pecan I bought straight off the shelf and I'm really not very good with telling if it's a little bit off. I will have to remember to buy fresh each time or buy more air-tight containers.