Cranberry and pear muffins

We went to a friend's 30th birthday party last month, where said friend got a little bit merry. At midnight, she decided we should pick some pears from the tree in their garden. In the pitch darkness, I managed to pick about 10 pears, but goodness know how. They weren't even ripe, and only became edible last week. They turned quite suddenly, so I needed to find a fun recipe to use some up. Cranberry and pear muffins sounded perfect. I'm entering these into the Calendar Cakes December blog challenge, hosted by the fabulous Dolly Bakes and Laura Loves Cakes.

These are quite festive and Christmassy, you could even decorate them with fresh cranberries and some foliage to look like holly.

300g self-raising flour
1/2tsp bicarb
150g caster sugar
2/3tsp mixed spice
2 eggs, beaten
100ml yoghurt
75ml milk
100g marg, melted and cooled a bit
3 pears, peeled, cored, and diced
60g dried cranberries

Preheat the oven to 200C (180C fan). Line a 12-hole muffin tin (I used some fancy muffin cases from last year's Good Food Show).
Mix the flour, bicar, sugar, and spice and sift into a big bowl
Combine eggs, yoghurt, milk, and butter. Add the pears and cranberries.
Stir the wet mixture into the dry ingredients and mix until just combined.
Spoon into the muffin cases
Bake for about 20 minutes.
Decorate with a little plain icing and a few dried cranberries.

Spooky spiderweb fudge muffins

Happy Halloween! To celebrate the witching hour, and, more importantly, October's Calendar Cakes challenge from Dolly Bakes and Laura Loves Cakes, I made some scrumptious chocolate fudge spiderweb muffins. Don't get too scared, they're only cakes...

Spiderweb muffins in a witch's cauldron

The recipe is from BBC Good Food.

50g dark chocolate
85g butter
1 tbsp coffee (you can use milk or just water if you prefer, I used espresso coffee)
200g self-raising flour
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
85g light muscovado sugar
50g golden caster sugar
1 egg
142ml soured cream

For the decorating:
100g dark chocolate
100g white chocolate

Don't be too scared of these fudge muffins

Melt the chocolate, butter, and coffee (or other liquid) in a glass bowl over simmering water. Allow to cool.
Mix together the dry ingredients and sieve.
Beat the egg and mix with the sour cream. Add this to the dry mix, then pour in the chocolate mix. Stir together carefully and don't over-mix.
Pour into muffin cases and bake at 190C (170C fan) for about 20 minutes.
 To decorate, melt the white and dark chocolate separately. Pour a little of each into separate piping bags. Spoon dark chocolate on to a muffin, quickly pipe circles of white chocolate on to the muffin, then use a small skewer to draw through the chocolate to make the spider web design. Do the same with the opposite design.

I found the decorating quick tricky as my kitchen was cold, and so the chocolate was hardening quickly. I would suggest melting half the chocolate at a time, and doing half a batch before melting the rest. Whatever you do, don't re-melt the chocolate if it hardens, as it will just turn into a glumpy mess. If the chocolate hardens inside the piping bags, I dipped them into the warm water over which I had melted the choc, which helped loosen it up a bit. Working quickly is KEY for them to look right. Mine are a bit hit and miss!

The bells of St Clements

For Mother's Day, I baked St Clements muffins - orange and lemon, with a lemony buttercream on top. They were meant to just be dusted with icing sugar to finish, but who can resist buttercream.

The muffin base was quite simple:

100g caster sugar
1 egg (although I only had 2 small bantam eggs to hand)
100ml milk
50g melted and cooled butter
1 tsp baking powder
175g self-raising flour

Cream together the sugar and egg, mix in the flour and baking powder gently, and add the melted butter, followed by the milk. The mixture looked a bit of a mess at this point - but I had faith. To the mixture, I added the grated rind of one lemon and one orange, plus a few chunks of orange, chopped up into small chunks.

Bake at 180 degrees (fan oven) for about 25 minutes.

Once cooled, I creamed together butter and icing sugar, with a splash of milk, together with more lemon rind, orange rind, and a splash each of lemon and orange juice. I like to make the buttercream quite tart, so I add more lemon than orange.

The muffins are light and fluffy, but still with that chunkiness of a muffin, with added luxury of the buttercream. Happy Mother's Day!

I have to add, those paper cases were a sod. They'd expanded in the drawer, so I had to re-fold every single one of the creases on every single blummin case.... it took forever. I won't be buying that brand of paper case again!