one thursday morning - armwrestling with chocolate

I would think that this recipe could've turned out so much better. the batter turned out too thick i think because i'd lacked the right amount of butter. i could definitely have up-ed the amount of sugar as well to get the muffins a lot more moist.
this was really a DARK CHOCOLATE-Y muffin batch. lacked a breadth of flavour though.

getting up early with dark rings under my eyes, body extremely knackered from lack of food for bout 3 days, i couldn't have been more depressed with the outcome of this recipe.
am determined to keep my work up to standard so i'm hoping the next thing i do will be miles better than this!

whatever it was, and despite my disappointment thereafter, it smelt gorgeous and has seemed to have fulfilled its purpose...has already melted his heart i believe.

LOL.

Lemon Cherry Think-of-me Muffins with Maple Syrup glaze

It's finally hit me!! I'm leaving Spore in 2 days time, and thus begins my long-waited university studies. Terribly nervous, darned excited, worried, exhilarated & so terribly melancholic too. My baggage has exceeded its limit. I hardly think I'll be able to move out of the terminal with 2 crazily heavy & large suitcases AND with myself strapped down with my laptop & large tote. Thank God I believe in miracles (someone have a little faith in me). Folks out there, do say a little prayer for me too that I can get to my university safely and without hurting anyone else either. I can already foresee maybe a broken toe (considering I keep dropping my luggage on my toes yesterday when I was trying to weigh them), a black eye, maybe a papercut from my x-ray sheets...GOSH! I can only hope.

Anyway, thinking that I've only 2 days left, I just had to say a temporary goodbye to my beloved oven & bake something for the family once again. Wouldn't hurt to fatten them a little so I won't feel so out of place when I come back home for Christmas all pudgy, round & wobbly :) And ah-hah, what did I think to bake today? My favourite food! MUFFINS!!! Of course, I was v determined to make large, oversized, giant muffins but think they didn't turn out that way. Just very dense, juicy pieces. But I'm still overjoyed with my non-texas-sized muffins because the flavour was just wonderful. something interesting yet mild enough to match the quiet sentiments & racing thoughts in me now. It's what I say would look simple & so ordinary but would be quite a sensory explosion in your mouth.

This recipe involves the use of a whole can of dark pitted cherries (abt 1,1/2cup or less if you're worried abt the moisture) so expect a nice juicy muffin :) Also, to mask a little of the heavy syrup taste (which I find a little too fake for my liking), I added grated lemon zest. I love lemons with just about anything. Fish, the ham in my sandwich, roasted chicken, of course lemon poppy seed cake so why not add em here? If you want an even greater tang, add a squeeze of juice as well or you can save the juice for a superb lemon glaze -- all you have to do is squeeze the juice into a saucepan & heat it after stirring some icing sugar into the pan. this is really great & it's easy to control the sweetness as to your liking. :)

Towards the end, if you're a chocolate fan, throw in crushed/chopped bits of dark chocolate. What I used here was Lindt Extra Fine Dark Chocolate 70% dark. I believe you can make use of whatever chocolate you have sitting around or whichever suits your taste the most. Milk, white, dark, extra dark. You choose!

Whenever I make muffins, I take joy in the fact tt I can cater to every single person in my family -- be it the chocolate-hating mother, the sugar-fearful dad, or the chocolate-obsessive sisters of mine. I cut the maple syrup glaze for my dad, didn't add any chocolate for my mom & drizzled a pretty generous amount for my sisters and slightly less for the currently-dieting me. :p Finally, would just like to say, this recipe was just something I wanted to give my family. It's simple & full of taste. luxurious & indulgent but not something as great and earthshaking as I would like to think. :D So just enjoy this, with a cold beer on a hot day if you'd like, or over good coffee & the morning paper.

Ingredients
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 1/4 cup white sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs
1 3/4 cups plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 tsp grated lemon zest
a can of dark pitted cherries, drained & patted dry
maple syrup for glazing

Preheat 190dC.
Cream butter with sugar & salt. Beat in eggs one at a time.

In separate bowl, whisk together flour and baking powder. Beat in the flour mixture alternately with the buttermilk, mixing until just incorporated.

Add grated zest (and a squeeze of lemon wedge for juice if you want) & fold carefully. Next up are the cherries. Fold in carefully & break a few pieces & watch how beautifully the cherry juice blends into the batter. It's really quiet beautiful :)

From here, spoon generously into muffin cups & bake for 30min.

Once they're done, remove em from the oven & immediately brush maple syrup onto the tops. A heavenly smell shall waft up your nose from here. It's a smell I find so hard to describe! The scent of the cherries, the lemon twang and that luscious maple syrup scent is just too great to try to put words to it. I have only one solution for it. Let it cool for bout 3-5min & then grab one and DIG IN!

April Babies!

15th of April! The day to produce Lianne's spread for her party on Sunday. Was really nervous when i started baking and doing the prep work. It's always like this when i'm making something for a big event. Baking jitters! Who would have thought? :D
From what I know, it's a little party to celebrate the birthdays of 10 adorable April babies. And these babies can't take sugar or eggs so the lil cupcakes that DIVANA came up with had little sugar, mostly banana and some honey with no egg at all. Honestly, I believe it was really ambitious of Sam and I to try doing such a recipe (not because i'm such a big fan of eggs and sugar) but because we've just about never tried something like that before! And to start it right out with a recipe of our own...dangerous...like balancing on a cliff in with a big jug of sloshing milk. The cupcakes (which are really muffins...) came out good and solid, smelling heavenly with their banana-ish perfume.

They weren't overly sweet but had a good texture and wholesome taste to it. Hopefully, they find a satisfied home in the stomachs of those pretty babies! I can only cross my fingers and hope with all my heart. What I really loved bout these cupcakes were the names piped onto them. I thought it was such a sweet thing to do...get one cupcake for each baby. Sam and I couldn't resist adding the little heart quins too. Adding a little of our love :) Sam started fantasising abt how this was her life..baking for babies..(of course she means her children)..fulfilling her dream of being a wonderful mother and a baking goddess in the kitchen, which of course i'm 100% confident of her becoming! She's amazing and i know she'll love her children and shower em with all the fat-full goodness of sugar, eggs and butter. Ritey sam? :D C'mon admit it..it's the only way to love em these days.

The chocolate cake was also the original DIVANA cake, made extra chocolatey as instructed by Lianne cause the adults apparently are chocolate fanatics. :D My kind of people. Well..all in all, it was a good day taking a rest from work and enjoying myself baking for people who love to eat.

So hey guys! I do hope you all really really REALLY enjoy em. And thanks Lianne for supporting me with your order. Somehow I hope you won't regret it. Maybe if it's bad, just don't contact me. Ha, so I can silently wallow in my shame. Have a nice time tmr!

p/s World Gourmet Summit is going on now. I'm so tempted to go for those classes or at least one of those 195++ per head dinners but that's major overkill and way past my budget considering i'm flying out to UK next week. Money's just never enough and the world's too big for my wallet!

My Volcanic Blueberry Chocolate Muffins

I'm too much of a chocolate fan to leave it out of something like blueberry muffins. Hence, this recipe which you'll see produces beautiful muffins that have fat blueberries bleedin into the muffins and taste great with these dark chocolate chips.
My tummy has recently been calling out for blueberries and the markets have of late also been bringing in some punnets of fat blueberries so i simply couldn't resist.

Honestly, I think i'm a person with pretty traditional taste buds so if you start to realise that most of the stuff i make on this blog tend to be the really simple classic stuff, don't hold it against me. I'm a lazy baker and a traditional one who seldom veers away from the good ol' stuff. And yea..i'm only eighteen so i'm still experimenting and discovering :D
Anyway, these muffins were really great. They came out big and firm with a nice crusty bite. The insides were real solid in that each bite didn't feel like it was 60% air. I never like muffins that are too light or fluffy because then I feel it doesn't pack a punch. I like my muffins big, generous and full of flavour. So this recipe was a big hit with myself, and my sisters. My dog was quite blown away too, though she didn't eat the chocolate bits cause she can't. The cinnamon i added into the batter didn't come out strong enough but i guess it's alright cause I still wanted the blueberries and the dark chocolate to be the stars of the show.


So here's the recipe. I trust that it's a no-fail one and it really uses simple ingredients. You can't go wrong with this.

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups plain flour
3/4 white sugar (don't be too generous with this)
a pinch of salt
2 tsp baking powder
1/3 cup canola oil
1 large egg
cinnamon sugar (you can prepare this yourself with your own measurements. I used storebought cinnamon sugar)
1/3 cup full-cream milk
a punnet blueberries
dark chocolate morsels

Preheat oven to 200dCelsius. Grease your muffin cups. I used medium sized ones but for real giants, use the texas muffin cups!!
Combine your flour, sugar, salt and baking powder. Make a well in the centre.
Place the oil into a 1 cup measuring cup; add the egg (already whipped) and enough milk to fill the cup to the brim. Pour into the well and mix with flour mixture. Do not overmix or the batter will become overly stiff.
Fold in the blueberries. Add a few shakes of cinnamon sugar (approx 1 tsp) and as much dark chocolate as you like. The more the merrier i'd say but not too much that you can't taste the blueberries any more.
Fill the muffin cups all the way, do not be afraid that the muffins would end up too heavy and rise in an ugly fashion. These turned out just fine like perfect volcanoes. :D

Cranberry Orange Muffins

It's a Friday and there's barely anything left in the kitchen to eat. What's a girl supposed to do for lunch then? I couldn't possibly sit around and let myself starve, especially since the day i graduated from college I haven't exactly been allowing myself to diet much or for that fact, mind how my body has been ballooning horizontally. :) But have you heard muffins for lunch! Golly. I'm so glad i'm living my world. Or at least living lunch my way when mom's out.

I really liked these muffins. I'm a chocolate lover up to my toes so i really am not such a big fan of things with fruit in them, with the exception of cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, blackberries and all the other berries that i can find. But these muffins tasted very REAL to me. I guess it's cause of the low amount of sugar used and the use of orange juice and milk to make up for that lack of sweetness. I also threw in some orange pulp and nibbling on them in the muffins was quite an experience. Honestly, I never did like fresh oranges. I didn't like the acidity of oranges, or the fact that they tended to make your nails orange and the bitter aftertaste if i bit too far into the peel. Until last year when i decided it was more worthwhile and fun (with all that juice squirting into my eyes) to eat a fresh orange than vitamin C pills.

This recipe is a Nigella Bites one. Orange Breakfast Muffins. But i'd recommend you add in some dried cranberries cause they give it an added sweetness. Remember watching Nigella on TV and she saying something like how muffins to her are a type of bread. Just break it open whether warm or cool and eat it with cream cheese or jam and that's how i ate mine. The muffins may seem to some to be a little bland (to a chocolate lover, definitely) but i guess you really have to get used to the fact that this recipe called for freshly squeezed juice so it tastes less sweet, but tangier and of course healthier. The smell of butter and milk is still wonderfully strong from these muffins and so, it's really yummy to eat it with strawberry cream cheese, homemade marmalade or really just simple strawberry jam. Best thing was I had this for lunch while watching Jamie Oliver dearest on Discovery Travel&Living-perfect afternoon. Makes the dreaful heat livable.

Cranberry Orange Muffins

Ingredients

75g unsalted butter

1 2/3 cup flour, sifted

1/4 cup ground almonds

1/2 tsp baking soda

2 tsp baking powder

1/3 cup sugar

zest of 1 orange, washed and dried

juice of one orange (abt 1/3 cup)

1/3 cup milk

1 egg

Preheat oven to 200dCelsius.

Melt butter and set aside to cool.

Combine flour,almonds,soda and baking pwder, sugar and zest in a bowl and give a little stir with a fork. Measure juice and milk into a jug and whisk in egg, followed by the cooled melted butter.

Make a well in the dried ingredients and neatly pour in the liquid ingredients into the well, mixing carefully but swiftly with a fork as you go until just incorporated and mixture starts to resemble yellow custard.

According to Nigella, if batter is too dry, add either a tbs of juice or milk. Bake for 20min and no longer. Once out of oven, transfer to wire rack to cool and while still slightly warm, crack open muffin and serve with jam! Voila!