Treacle and Greengage Muscovado Muffins

When I saw that Dan Lepard's column in the Guardian a few weeks ago was all about baking with treacle I quickly investigated further - I love treacle and baking with it. So far from being a slightly 'weird' ingredient as Dan proposes, I was keen to see what he was suggesting we could use this gorgeously sticky substance for now. Both recipes appealed, but the Treacle and Caraway Apple muffins sounded amazing. Unfortunately I discovered fairly recently that I'm not really a fan of the flavour of caraway in baked goods. Perhaps it's something I'll come to appreciate more (as I get older, or should that be wiser?) but at the moment, caraway is no-go. Easy enough to leave out though. I also had a glut of greengages and decided to use those instead of the specified apples - there will be time enough for apples later in the autumn and I wanted to make the most of the last of the seasonal fruit available now. I changed the proportion of flours too, and have noted my changes here.

Treacle and Greengage Muscovado Muffins
Ingredients (for method, follow the link highlighted in the text above to Dan's recipe in the Guardian)
100g butter, melted
40g sunflower oil
50g black treacle
175g light muscovado sugar
3 eggs
2tsp vanilla extract
200g plain flour
100g wholemeal spelt flour
2tsp baking powder
around 6 small(ish) greengages, chopped into about 8 each
Oats to scatter

Since the recipe specifies scattering the muffins with flaked almonds before baking I racked my brains for a suitable alternative and came up with oats - not quite as crunchy (in fact not nearly as crunchy) but provided a little visual appeal to the finished article and a bit of a contrast of textures. I think next time I'd be a little more generous with the oats. I also made 18 muffins out of this mixture, which was perfect for me - 12 would have made very large muffins for my requirements.

These were immensely popular at work, and rightly so. The combination of flavours - the treacle, vanilla and then the soft delicate plum were great together. They were beautifully moist and the greengages worked superbly in place of apples, becoming deliciously soft and squashy. I'm sure that any soft plum would work well (although I'm not sure about those ones that are bullet hard and available year round). The treacle flavour was definitely there, adding depth and background, but if you're not a treacle fan, it wasn't overwhelming. I gave my version of the recipe to an interested colleague. I hope she enjoys them as much as the rest of us did. I'll definitely make these again and would recommend you make them too! 

Courgette, Raisin and White Chocolate Cakes

This will be a fairly brief post - a record of a good recipe that I think I'd probably like to make again some day. Unfortunately it wasn't very photogenic and I ran out of time to add a photogenic topping, meaning that the few photos I have aren't very attractive.

This is the opposite of the experience of eating the aforementioned cake, which is really rather enjoyable. I wanted something naturally green to enter We Should Cocoa this month, where the theme set by Chele is Green! And specifically not eco-green. Green green!

Courgettes are green, and so I decided on a cake with courgettes in it. Cake with courgettes in it is not really green - more brown. I used this recipe from Delicious. magazine. I did adapt it slightly though, so have given my list of ingredients below:

160g courgettes, grated
100g raisins
60g (4tbsp) lemon juice
2tbsp honey
3 large eggs
140g sunflower oil (using a .8 conversion from the weight given)
200g light muscovado sugar
225g self raising flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
100g chopped white chocolate

The instructions tell you to line a 12 hole large muffin tin. I'm not actually sure what size they mean because there would have been way too much mixture for my standard 12 hole muffin tin. There is an option to use a 23cm round tin to bake the mixture in, so I had already decided to use my 20cm square tin (rule of thumb that the same mixture will fill a square tin 1" smaller than the corresponding round tin). As I poured the mixture in I had the feeling that it wasn't all going to fit - my tin isn't very deep, and the batter was rather runny. I quickly put muffin cases into a 6 cup muffin tin that would fit alongside the cake tin in the oven, and filled 5 of the 6 holes with mixture. Hence the previous comment that there is no way I could have fitted all the mixture into a 12 hole standard tin. I think perhaps this should be made clearer in the recipe, most people only have one size of muffin tin, and would not take note of the 'large' part of the instructions.

Best part of the recipe - simmering the raisins with the lemon juice and honey - it just smelled so delicious! My muffins baked for 30 minutes and the large cake for about 45-50 minutes. Neither of them rose particularly to a peak - it isn't often you see a cake emerging that is entirely flat, but this one was! The cake was darker than I was expecting, but I guess this is due to the caramelisation of the sugars in the honey and the white chocolate. Most of the white chocolate sank to the bottom. I promise it was in there, it's just that the muffin I chose to cut open was sadly lacking on the white chocolate front!

I loved this cake - sweet, but not too sweet and very light and moist without being at all oily. The raisins and white chocolate were a lovely combination and I would make this again. It was popular at work - I wrote a little note to remind people that veggies in cakes are nice - just remember carrot cake! I think my colleagues are getting used to slightly random experiments appearing, so even those who usually use courgettes in soup are happy to try them in cake, which pleases me greatly! If you look hard, you can see that the cake has some little green flecks in it - that's courgette! And I was in 'think green' mode - I used my green knife, you can just see it at the back of the picture, to cut open the cakes!

As I have run out of time to make something more obviously chocolate-y (I promise the white choc was there!) and more obviously green, this will be my submission for this months We Should Cocoa. The challenge is hosted by Choclette of Choc Log Blog and Chele of Chocolate Teapot. The host this month is Chele and the theme (as I think I might have mentioned!) is green.