Maple Syrup Butter Cookies

When Dom from Belleau Kitchen and Karen of Lavender and Lovage announced that this month, their two challenges; Random Recipes and Tea Time Treats were getting together I had mixed feelings. Not that this isn't a good pairing, but rather that my heart sort of sinks when I have no control over the recipe I have to make - I am a complete control freak and hate having decisions taken out of my hands. And this month this would apply to another of the challenges I like to enter, not just random recipes itself.

So I took a deep breath, opened one of my (many - what, are you surprised I have many) baking books. I chose 'Mix' which is one of my books containing recipes from the Australian Women's Weekly. I really like these recipe - there are often combinations that I haven't thought of, or different presentations that inspire me to bake. And my recipe was these rather cute little maple syrup butter cookies.

The chosen book - note all the stickers for recipes I want to make

Perfect - nothing says 'Teatime' to me more than biscuits. These were really quick and easy to put together. They're a melting-moment type biscuit. I tried to find the recipe online, but find the AWW website very hard to navigate so I had to give up. They consist of butter beaten with maple syrup and a tiny dash of vanilla. This was my only real problem making them - the butter and maple syrup is supposed to become light and fluffy but mine split and wouldn't do light and fluffy. Plain flour and cornflour is then added and they are piped onto prepared trays to be baked. They were fun to pipe (I like piping generally), if a little sticky.

First batch - nicely cooked

After the first batch came out of the oven I decided to refrigerate the rest and see if they would keep their shape better - they didn't so I wouldn't bother wasting time refrigerating them again. The first batch were baked while I had something else in the oven underneath them, the second batch were alone in the oven and have consequently coloured more on the base. I am still trying to learn the foibles of my new oven.

Second batch - overbaked

The house smelled particularly delicious while these were baking - what's not to like about warm maple syrup and butter - utterly divine! I would try these again - I wanted to see if I can get them to keep their shape a little better and I might try using the fan oven instead of the conventional setting.They were very buttery and quite crisp at first with a melt in the mouth texture that comes from the use of cornflour as part of the flour. The maple syrup flavour was unfortunately not to my taste at all. I don't know why, but they really didn't appeal to me at all. The texture was great - melting and delicate, but the flavour was just so wrong. I haven't baked a lot with maple syrup before, but these were not pleasant. And I also found that as the only sweetening agent was the syrup they weren't quite sweet enough for my taste in biscuits either. A bit of a disappointment and a definite don't make again.

I can't decide what to do with them now, whether to give up on them as a bad job (made about a week ago now) or whether to whip up a batch of buttercream and sandwich them together - this would counteract the problem of them not being sweet enough but might make them soggy. Hmm, what would you do? Or can you recommend good baking recipes using maple syrup please?

Edited to add: I am also submitting these into Jac's Bookmarked Recipes feature, since they are also something in this recipe book that I have been meaning to make for ages.

Butterscotch Banana Cakes - Short and Tweet

This is the latest installment in the twitter challenge Short and Tweet - baking from Dan Lepard's book Short and Sweet. You can find the blog here, and the whole thing is organised by @EvidenceMatters who spends ages doing the wonderful round ups you can see on the blog each week.

This weeks choices were tailored towards providing a treat for Mothering Sunday (this Sunday 18th March in the UK, although I know that in Australia and the US, Mother's Day isn't until May). They included Saffron Peach Cake, Orange Cassata Cake or Butterscotch Banana Cake. You can find the schedule for March's challenges here.

I love my mum dearly, but we've never done much in the way of celebrating Mothering Sunday, and indeed, this year she is jetting off on holiday on the day, so no need for me to provide a cake to celebrate. With other constraints taken into account I chose the Butterscotch Banana Cake. I have made this before (blog post here) and wasn't really very sure of it then (I found it a little oily), but since it seems to take a couple of attempts for me to really like some recipes I thought I'd give it another whirl. 

You can find the recipe online here on the Guardian website. The published recipe is very similar. When I weighed my banana flesh I found I had 2/3 of the required amount and it was easy to scale everything else back to 2/3 of the original too. For the wholegrain part of the recipe I used wholemeal spelt flour. I didn't have the specified yogurt, but used a splash of milk instead. Not really the correct substitution at all, but never mind. I also decided to make cupcakes rather than a full size cake as Dan mentions that the recipe works well as cupcakes and gives a time for them to bake. This saved me having to work out what size tin I'd need for 2/3 of the recipe and wondering how long to bake for.

The first step is to caramelise the bananas in a sugar syrup. I was a little wary of the wet sugar syrup splitting and crystallising horribly as has happened in the past, but I was in luck and it didn't. It did seem to take ages of boiling for it to get to the required dark reddish caramel, but patience eventually allowed it to happen. There is always something really satisfying when you start to see the sugar start to change colour into caramel and then the whole pan quickly follows. I cooked the banana for quite a while - not that I was distracted whilst doing it.... Actually, it just meant that the banana broke down really easily.

I cannot begin to describe how delicious bananas cooking in hot caramel is. I remember how I almost stopped at this stage last time too - so tempting to just pour this into a bowl and eat with a big scoop of icecream. Instead I scooped it into the cake batter and mixed well:

This was then spooned into the waiting muffin cases. I filled them about 2/3 full and really wasn't expecting much of a rise - I think because last time, when I made this as a full cake the middle was a little sunken.

As you can see my 2/3 batter mixture made 10 muffins. And I think I could possibly have squeezed 11 out of the mixture had I been a little meaner when dividing them up. But who wants a mean cake? And I was pleasantly surprised to see a lovely soft little peak on the cakes:

I struggled to know how to decorate these little cakes. When I made the large cake I just left it plain, but small cakes are somehow more demanding of a decoration of sorts. I briefly considered buttercream, but dismissed the idea as too sweet and sickly on top of an already sweet cake. I then decided to make a simple glace icing, but with unrefined icing sugar to give a complementary toffee flavour to that found in the cakes. Sadly, my unrefined icing sugar was clumped and hardened beyond hope of redemption. (And I'm not prepared to whizz it bit by bit in my mini food processor to get it to a useable state again - I don't much enjoy breathing icing sugar!). Back to the drawing board. Then it occured to me that I could use normal icing sugar with a little golden syrup to bring that toffee-ish flavour to the icing. Yum!

So my icing for these buns consisted of about 150g icing sugar, a tbsp of golden syrup and enough water to make a thick icing. It was a tasty icing, and one I'll have to bear in mind for future recipes too.

Verdict? Great recipe - quite time consuming in terms of making the caramel, cooking the banana in it and then leaving to cool but once that bit is done, it's plain sailing. You can see from the picture below just how rich and moist the interior of the cake is - the reddish brown of the caramel definitely comes through. They are light, very banana-ry and very moist and I didn't find them oily at all this time. Sadly I just didn't like them all that much. The cooked strands of banana in the cake were a little offputting and gave a texture I just wasn't keen on. However, this is entirely a personal thing because one of my colleagues said that she thought these were possibly the best cakes I have ever taken to work! I'm glad I gave them another go because I've changed my mind on a couple of things after giving them a second chance, but I'll stick to a more standard banana cake recipe from now on.

Jam Buttermilk Muffins

Brief note to self - don't bother making these again, there are better ways of using up a tub of buttermilk. I seem to be having a run of making things that just aren't quite to my taste at the moment. Hope I snap out of it soon, very frustrating!

The recipe came from 'Muffins - Fast and Fantastic'. It's the basic buttermilk muffin recipe with a tsp of morello cherry jam added before baking. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the recipe, it just isn't to my taste. Not quite sweet enough I think, and when the muffins were baked there was a slightly odd (and offputting) appearance to the tops of them.

Eaten up happily at work, which goes to show that everyone's tastes differ.

Potato and Dill bread

I was very interested to see that Dan Lepard's Saturday Guardian recipes this week focussed on using potatoes in baking. There is an interesting introduction to the recipes where he discusses the qualities that potatoes bring to a recipe, either raw or cooked. I have baked with potatoes in bread before on a couple of occasions and had quite good results so I was keen to try the recipes this week. The loaf appealed more than the potato cakes (although they sound pretty good too - for another time I think) so I added dill to my shopping list for the weekend, already having the rest of the ingredients to hand.

As is often the case, I halved the recipe. As I was making it, the dough was very wet and sticky - but kneading on plenty of olive oil made the dough easier to handle. I was concerned that it was sufficiently wet that I'd end up with a frisbee of bread - not quite my intention, so I decided to bake it in a 2lb loaf tin. This was a little large for the quantity of dough, but the dough just about reached the top of the tin. I had trouble slashing the loaf as it was quite wobbly as I put it into the oven (I don't think my dough would have stood as a loaf) and I didn't really get any oven spring, but then I wasn't careful with timings and had probably left it too long before baking. My own fault.

When the loaf had had about 40 minutes (I think I baked at Gas 7 for ten minutes then Gas 6 rather than Gas 7 all the time - I prefer a lighter crust) I turned it over to brown the base of the loaf. At this point I was rather worried because the crumb felt very, very soft, and indeed, the bottom of the loaf did sink a bit when it was finishing the baking upside down.

I had visions of cutting into the loaf and the middle squidging out at me, but thankfully my fears were not realised! The crumb is quite open and very, very moist (but not in a 'wet' way, which would be bad). I did use quite a bit of dill (and you can see it in the crust) but my tastebuds must have been killed by years of sugar or something because I didn't really taste the dill. It isn't  a herb I've used much before though, so I probably missed the subtlety of the flavour. Though on reflection as I've eaten more of it, there is a distinct flavour, it's just a new one for me. I think this is the kind of bread that grows on you. At first I wasn't all that impressed, but I am getting to like it more the more I eat it.

I think, all in all that this was a good bread, but it isn't quite to my personal taste. The volume of potato is quite big and this affects the crumb significantly. I'm sure that I could get used to this style of bread, but life is about choices, and although a good recipe, this one isn't for my tastes.

It has started me thinking about potato in dough though - and I am wondering what effect substituting a small part of the flour in a bread dough with potato starch/potato flour would do. Hmmm. I feel some experimenting coming on!

I'm linking this up to Herbs on a Saturday, a blog hop run by Karen of Lavender and Lovage.

Chelsea Buns - Fail

Edited 30/01/12 in response to an anonymous comment. Please see end of post.

I guess there isn't really much to say about these, but I'm going to anyway. I wanted to make a sweet yeasted dough to enter into the Teatime Treats challenge that is run each month by either Kate of What Kate Baked or Karen of Lavender and Lovage. This month's theme was sweet doughs or pastries and I fancied trying my hand at Chelsea Buns. I have in fact made Chelsea buns before to a different recipe, but haven't yet blogged them. In the interests of this blog being a record of the recipes I attempt and how they turn out (good or bad, but happily rather more of the former than the latter) I am including this recipe.

It is from a trusted source, and so I can only imagine that it was a combination of errors on my part and perhaps the recipe that caused the result to be so disappointing. The recipe can be found here, and I think is also available in a published recipe book.

I did follow the recipe, but not to the letter. My dough had rather more time to rise at all stages as I was distracted by various other things and at the final stage the oven was occupied by something else when I needed to bake these. However, I reduced the temperature given in the recipe slightly, and baked for less than the initial time stated. When I tentatively opened the oven door (my oven has a solid, not a glass door, which is a pain in these cases) the buns were already over-browned.

I wish I could say that these were only cosmetic problems. When the buns were baked it was too late to try one, so they had to be left until the next day. By the time I started to split them it was immediately apparent that they were almost stale, and once split into separate buns they staled very, very quickly indeed. Perhaps this is a characteristic of this recipe, but if so, it is not a desirable one to me. I have to confess that I was so disappointed with the appearance of them and the rate at which they staled that I didn't even bother to eat one. So I suppose they may taste fantastic, but this is not a recipe I shall ever repeat.

Just typing this up is making me feel sad and disappointed, disillusioned with baking. They looked so promising before baking. I hate it when things go wrong at the last stage. So much time and effort wasted. But I have other, more successful recipes to share soon, and will move on from this disaster. I would love to know whether simply leaving the dough to proove for too long caused all my problems... any thoughts?

Edited 30/01/12 in response to an anonymous comment.
Anonymous said...

You imply that you didn't in fact follow the recipe, that in fact you left the dough for too long at every stage. Given that it's a yeasted dough, this would mean that the dough was exhausted by the time that it got into the oven, and so the failure, I'm afraid, is yours... the buns were not stale, you'd simply let the dough "die" before it got to the oven. Always unfair when someone does this, then tries to blame the recipe.

I'm glad that you felt able to comment on my blog, I like reading all of the comments I receive and try to respond to them all. I felt that this comment warranted a fuller reply than I could give in the comments section.

Firstly, I do not imply that I have not followed the recipe - I am clear that the dough had too long at all stages, an outright statement is not an implication. Secondly, I understand that over-proofed dough would have no oven spring, this was not a complaint I made of the recipe. I was unaware that overproofed sweet dough, or any dough for that matter, goes stale quickly. I have not experimented and have no evidence to suggest this is either true or false. Having read other people's comments it does in fact seem to be a characteristic of these sweeter doughs to stale more quickly. Finally, I have not blamed the recipe in the slightest. I have been careful to present a balanced view, that it is likely to be a combination of factors that have led to my failure with this recipe. I think you have misunderstood me. Just because I have failed with this recipe does not mean that it is the recipe's fault, and I have accepted that as the baker, I am partly to blame. However, my blog is a record of the things I have baked, successful and not - I like to remember what I don't want to repeat and it makes a change from always successful. My gripe with this recipe is that the temperatures and times given are too hot and too long for a sweet dough baked in my oven. Perhaps a misjudgement on my part to not reduce the temperature further, but if I had I would have strayed even further from the recipe - it seems I cannot win.

I would be happy to correspond with my anonymous commenter if they care to get in touch - my email details are in the side bar.

And a final thought - wouldn't life be boring if everything were to be perfect the first time round!

Honey not-nut raisin banana muffins

These are Dan Lepard's recipe from his fabulous series How to Bake (from which the recipes in the recent Short and Sweet are taken), published last week. I was lucky enough to be able to find some relatively ripe bananas in the supermarket so I was able to make them straight away.

As a no-nut person, I substituted the nuts for 100g raisins. Luckily I like raisins (well, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't have put them in) because I do like to be able to substitute something to provide the textural contrast that the nuts would have done. The texture of raisins is obviously soft and chewy rather than crunchy like nuts, but I like this in my muffin, and to my mind, raisins are a great flavour combo with bananas, cinnamon and honey.

As I followed the recipe as written, aside from the aforementioned substitution of 100g of raisins for the specified 125g nuts and the use of light olive oil rather than sunflower so I will leave you to find the original recipe and method here. I used a fairly bog-standard runny honey.

These smelled very strongly of cinnamon while they were baking, and they weren't massive movers in terms of rising. They did rise, but are a wholesome muffin, more suited to breakfast-on-the-run rather than a cake to be eaten daintily with afternoon tea. I'm sure though, that this was the intention of the recipe, and for this purpose it suceeded entirely. I didn't really taste the honey in them, but then I did use a very mild honey, and the raisins were a good substitute for the nuts, providing little bursts of sweetness and juiciness in the muffin. Yum.

A good recipe for muffins as a substitute for breakfast, but not as a light and airy treat.

Chilli Chocolate Fudge Cake

It seems only right that my celebration of Chocolate Week should contain my submission to We Should Cocoa, the challenge designed to celebrate chocolate in all ways throughout the year. This time, Choclette from Chocolate Log Blog is hosting and she has chosen chilli as the ingredient to pair with chocolate for this month's challenge.

A tricky one, I'm sure you'll agree, but instead of remembering things I'd like it to, my brain is littered with the sparks associated with recipes I've seen and been meaning to make for ages. So when the chilli challenge  was announced, this recipe from Dan Lepard immediately popped it's head up and demanded attention. Apparently my memory is pretty long for cake related issues, as this recipe was first posted in September 2008.

I made only minor changes to the recipe - I substituted crunchy peanut butter for the tahini, as I don't have tahini and I do have peanut butter and wanted to use it up. I used the smaller amount of chilli flakes (1/4tsp). I also used the stipulated 8" square tin rather than the pictured round one!!!

The recipe was a little involved to make, with a few different steps, but none of them were difficult. I think the cake was probably done at 1 hour, but I left mine a further 10 minutes, which may have been a mistake...

The chilli heat was a slow build, you couldn't really tell it was there at first, but there was a chilli aftertaste. The predominant taste was of peanuts, and the contrasting lime icing was really delicious and refreshing, I wish there had been more icing to cake - perhaps baking in a shallower tin would help here. The cake was very crumbly in texture, and I don't know whether this is how it was meant to be, or whether I'd overbaked it, but it was tricky to pick up and eat! It was really well received at work, and I had a recipe request (with the requestee being directed to the Guardian website!) too!

All in all, not my favourite chocolate cake, but definitely an interesting and different kind of chocolate cake for the more adventurous baker/eater of chocolate cakes!

Bread - less successful

Maize bread

One of the points of keeping this blog is to record the things I make and bake - wonderful, and not so wonderful. Periodically I have a complete fail and occasionally just can't bring myself to blog about it, but mostly you get the good, the bad and the indifferent (in my opinion - you might try these and love them). Blogging the indifferent reminds me that I've made it, why I wasn't that keen and reminds me not to bother trying again! Not everything can be fantastic and, in my opinion, the two breads that follow fall in the indifferent, not really worth trying again category.

Both are from Dan Lepard's book The Handmade Loaf. I feel bad saying that I didn't like these, but it's true. There are lots of recipes in there and it's down to personal taste that I don't like these rather than bad recipes so don't let this put you off the book.

Lemon Barley Loaf

Up first: Lemon Barley Cob. This is a hybrid sourdough/yeasted loaf and for some reason the flavour combination just didn't do it for me. I don't know whether I let the bread overproof (I seem to remember that I did) but the texture was quite odd too - sort of crumbly, so I'm not quite sure where/if I went wrong here. In any event I wasn't all that keen on the lemon. Dan says this is a savoury bread, and I would totally agree that it wasn't sweet at all, but I couldn't find a good partner for it, so I'm unlikely to make it again with lemon. I might try the base recipe with the barley flour and sourdough/yeast hybrid again at some point, but I might not.

Lemon Barley loaf

Secondly: Maize Bread. This is a straight yeasted dough using white bread flour and maize flour plus buttermilk as part of the wet ingredients, and has cooked polenta broken up into it. The recipe worked fine, I didn't allow it to overproof and it was straightforward to make. My antipathy towards this one is based mostly on texture - again it seems slightly crumbly to me, which I'm putting down to lack of gluten in the maize flour (which is 30% of the flour in the recipe) and my taste buds can't really detect any specific flavour in there, it seems insipid which I wasn't expecting. I wonder if I forgot the salt? Anyway, I probably won't make this one again. The day I made it, J dropped in on her way home from holiday. I was planning to give her half of this so she probably feels glad that it wasn't made in time!!! I'm eating it, I'm just not over the moon about it.

Maize bread

So there you go, two that I just didn't enjoy that much. Live and learn!

Black olive sesame loaf

A couple of sweet things followed by a savoury. I do try and mix it up a bit so that those of you who aren't so interested in the cakes don't lose interest entirely, and those who don't want to see just bread aren't bombarded by yeasted entities. Me, I love them both.... hence why they all feature here! Do you prefer posts about bread, or do cakes rock your world more?

I found sumac in the supermarket a few months ago, and bought it. I'm pretty sure I'd seen a couple of recipes calling for it, and even though I couldn't remember where they were I knew I'd find them again at some point. I still haven't. And after I'd bought my rather expensive sumac, it started appearing everywhere in my sights, most notably at a much more reasonable price in the local vegetarian co-op. Sigh!!! Anyway, I was intruiged by my purchase and immediately opened it up to have a sniff, it smells utterly lovely, sort of citrussy but not. That's not a great desciption I grant you, but then I'm not great at describing things! So I couldn't wait to use it. Luckily for me, Dan Lepard published a recipe for black olive sesame loaf, requiring sumac!

The first time I made it I followed the recipe (which can be found here on the Guardian website) very closely (aside from halving it, ongoing storage problems), with kalamata olives and sesame seeds. You can see the result in the top picture. Very successful. However, I'm not entirely sure about sesame seeds and so the loaf languished and I thought I'd better make it again without the sesame.... I only had green olives available this time round, and again intended to make a half recipe. I carefully measured out half of the olives, yeast, sugar and proceeded to add the warm water. I added half the flour and looked at the resulting slop and wondered whether it had been this wet last time. I guess you're a step ahead of me and I realised the full amount of water would obviously require the full amount of flour.... I added more olives once I'd realised my watery error. Aside from that, the baking went to plan and produced a lovely light loaf.

It's defnitely one for the olive lovers (that'd be me then) you can see just how many olives are in each mouthful. It's a great partner for my cheese sandwiches (sometimes it's good to be satisfied with the same filling - I can't quite see this bread working so well with say, egg mayonnaise or salmon, but thinking about it, I bet it'd be great if you like ham (I don't) or cured meats (ditto) or maybe even tuna.... I need to branch out a bit) and I love the salty olives. Mmmm, salty (in the style of Homer Simpson). Having said this, I was disappointed with the topping. Because the loaf is baked at a high temperature (although I didn't bake mine as hot as specified, choosing to give it longer at a lower temperature instead) the topping seems to catch a little, and although I'm now used to the flavour of the topping on the loaf I actually think it would probably be better without. Sorry Dan! I also can't really distinguish any flavour added by the sumac or lemon, it just tastes of thyme and oregano to me. Anyway you live and learn and to end on a positive note, this is a great loaf for olive lovers and a little out of the ordinary.

We Should Cocoa - White chocolate and strawberry muffins

June seems to be whizzing by rapidly and I haven't made much of a start on all of the challenges I want to participate in, but it always seems to happen that way - I'm very much a last-minute type person. Anyway, I have at least managed to get this month's We Should Cocoa entry made. This month Choclette at Chocolate Log Blog is hosting the challenge and she felt that after some pretty difficult ingredients and last month's roulade challenge that we all deserved something easier and picked strawberries.

I think strawberries and chocolate do go well together, but of the summer berries strawberries are not my favourite - I much prefer raspberries (guess how excited I was that raspberries were the first pick for We Should Cocoa way back last September!). But not everything can be my favourite and strawberries are lovely too so I set about looking for a recipe that combined cooked strawberries and chocolate. I'm not a massive fan of cooked strawberries, but I needed a cake that would keep for a day or two, and while there are millions of recipes where strawberries are incorporated as a decoration I wasn't sure how well my strawberries would keep out of the fridge, so I decided to go the cooked route. After much searching I ended up adapting a recipe designed for raspberries.

These are based on Nigella Lawson's Lemon Raspberry Muffins in 'How to be a Domestic Goddess'.

White chocolate and strawberry muffins

Ingredients

60g butter

200g plain flour

2tsp baking powder

1/2tsp bicarbonate of soda

150g caster sugar

juice and grated zest of one lemon

approx 120ml milk

1 large egg

175g strawberries, washed, dried, hulled and chopped

100g good quality white chocolate, chopped

Method

- Preheat the oven to gas 6/200C. Line a 12 hole muffin tin with paper cases.

- Melt the butter and set aside to cool.

- Stir together the flour, baking powder, bicarb, sugar and zest in a large bowl.

- Pour the lemon juice into a measuring jug and make up to 200ml with milk. This will curdle which is fine.

- Beat the egg and melted butter into the curdled milk mixture.

- Combine the wet and dry ingredients gently but thoroughly to ensure no flour pockets remain but don't overmix.

- Briefly mix in the strawberries and white chocolate.

- Spoon into prepared cases and bake for 25 minutes.

- Allow to cool in the tin and then after 10 minutes move to a wire rack.

It may not come as a surprise to you that I was really disappointed with the way these looked. I was envisaging beautiful peaked muffins and what I got was a flat top that had barely risen at all. I don't really know why this is - the cases were nearly that full when I put them into the oven. My tsps of baking powder were scant as I was running out, perhaps that made all the difference? Perhaps substituting strawberries for raspberries was a mistake - strawberries are 'wetter' than raspberries. Maybe the mixture couldn't hold the extra chocolate? Who knows! I do know that all of the strawberries and chocolate chunks sank to the bottom during baking, which again, I wouldn't have expected of a recipe labelling itself 'muffin' - muffin recipes are generally quite good at holding 'add-ins' in suspension in the batter. I feel betrayed.

On the plus side, they smelled fantastic while they were baking, and in spite of appearances they tasted pretty good too. They were a little too sweet for me - probably should have reduced the sugar a little, given that I was using strawberries and masses of sweet white chocolate, but adding the lemon was a revelation - it really lifted the flavour of the muffin/cake without being too lemon-y. That's definitely something I'll do again. The flavour combo was good, but the recipe just didn't work for me. A pity, but I still enjoyed my muffin!

You can see how all the strawberries and white chocolate have sunk to the bottom.

Banoffee Muffins

I was sorting through my baking cupboard the other day and amongst the (many) ingredients I found that I either wanted or needed to use up was a tin of caramelised condensed milk. OK, in all honesty there were two tins.... what can I say? They must have been on special offer (I am the marketing man's idea of heaven, with suggestible tattooed across my forehead). A while ago, because they both need using up!

So where to turn for inspiration on what to do with the aforementioned caramel? Well, how about the manufacturer's website?! It wouldn't usually occur to me to be so sensible, but I was already aware of the carnation website (probably because they went through a phase of advertising it by posting yummy looking recipes in quite a lot of the cooking magazines I get) so that's where I headed, and after browsing through all of their baking recipes, I decided on the Banoffee Muffin recipe.

I fortunately had the required over-ripe bananas, well, I only had one, but it was a monster with black speckled skin, threatening to overwhelm anyone who entered the kitchen with its sickly sweet pungent banana aroma (I do actually like bananas, just not when they're that ripe). So the muffins were the obvious choice.

I followed the recipe as given apart from baking them for another five minutes or so. And I obviously didn't add the optional pecans, but I imagine they would be nice, and give a welcome crunch to the soft muffin. I had quite a bit of mixture left over, probably almost enough for another muffin. Which was annoying. I couldn't fit any more mixture into the cases and as it was quite a few decided to overflow slightly, so although they don't look very peaked, this isn't because there was a mean amount of mixture.

Verdict? Well, they had the desired effect of using up the blackening banana and a can of caramelised condensed milk very effectively. They were nice, but I don't think muffins are my favourite form of eating cake really. The tops were nice and soft and gooey, and the crumb was soft and tender, and not too sweet, until you hit a sweet pocket of caramel. I made sure to keep the blobs of caramel quite big, and it worked well as you can see. They were nice, but I wouldn't be desperate to make them again. On the plus side, they were quick and easy enough to make on a weeknight evening to take to work the next day, always a bonus!