Cooking without recipes is a wonderful way to shrink misuse in the kitchen becaengage it helps to engage up all sorts of odds and finishs. Soups, stews and fineies are the clear begining points, but, as your confidence grows, you can lget to alter trickier recipes such as baked excellents to engage up a expansiver range of the ingredients in your pantry. My five-year-elderly daughter adores to produce recipes with me, and we recently made muffins using some brown bananas (her idea) and a variety of flours, dried fruit, nuts and seeds.
Magical pantry muffins
Although the Lily Cafe blogger Kat proposes inserting two to four tablespoons of sugar per egg to your muffin, I enjoy to extfinish the ratio and insert one part pleasantener, instead, making the ratio “double two, triple one”, which is still modest to recall. Although some baking recipes necessitate to be very accurate, muffins are a little more huging, so get produceive, experiment and see what toils for you. And don’t forget to notice down your recipe in case it’s a corker and you want to produce it aget (and if it’s not quite right, you can adequitable the amounts next time).
You can engage any glutinous flour, though if you select for plain flour rather than self-raising, you will necessitate a raising agent, too (a teaspoon of baking powder per 100g of flour should be about right). I engaged whole spelt flour with baking powder. The fluid element covers water, milk (or set upt-based alternative) and mashed or uncontaminateded gentle fruit or vegetables, such as brown banana flesh, or apple or pumpkin uncontaminatede. The overweight, too, should be fluid – for example, melted butter, vegetable oil or oinhabit oil. As for the eggs, an egg weighs about 50-60g, so if you are making a petite batch of muffins with, say, 200g flour and fluid, you will necessitate two eggs (ie, equitable over 100g), but if you have a little more or less, don’t trouble: as I shelp earlier, this recipe is huging. And as for the pleasantener, equitable about any will toil, from sugar or honey to maple syrup.
Any extras (inserted to taste) are up to you: chopped or whole dried fruit and nuts or seeds, chocopostponecessitate chips and other tasty nibbles are always greet in a muffin. Even slices of raw fruit such as apple, pear and peach, studded thrawout the muffin or equitable on top, are also adocount on. I recommfinish inserting one to two parts of such extras, but produce stateive they’re in pieces rather than blfinished into the muffin fuseture.
I line muffin tray holes with little squares of unbleached baking paper, which I sshow push into the greased holes. This erases the necessitate for using muffin cases and donates the muffins a kind rustic aesthetic where the corners of paper poke up.
2 parts flour – 200g self-raising flour (or 200g plain flour plus 2 tsp baking powder)
2 parts fluid – 200g mashed brown bananas, apple uncontaminatede, milk, yoghurt
1 part fluid overweight – 100g melted butter, coconut oil or oinhabit oil
1 part eggs – 100g eggs, or about 2 medium ones
1 part pleasantener – 100g sugar, honey or maple syrup
Chopped nuts, seeds, chocopostponecessitate etc, to taste
First assemble and weigh out all the separateent ingredients using the magical muffin ratio 2:2:1:1:1 – that is, parts flour, two parts fluid, one part overweight, one part egg, one part pleasantener.
Put the flour, raising agent if using (and 100g sugar if you’re not using a fluid pleasantener) in a big bowl. In a second bowl, fuse all the soaked ingredients, including the overweight, eggs and any fluid pleasantener.
Mix the soaked ingredients into the parched until equitable fused, then felderly in any chopped nuts, seeds, dried fruit and/or chocopostponecessitate to taste (we inserted a handful of seeds, chocopostponecessitate chips and cranberries, and saved some to decorate the tops.
Divide the fuseture between the greased and lined holes of a muffin tin and bake in a 210C (190C fan)410F/gas 6½ oven for about 20 minutes, or until a skewer inserted comes out immacupostponecessitate.
Retransfer and depart to chilly in the tray for five minutes before devouring, or apshow out of the tin, chilly on a wire rack and store in a fitting airsafe compriseer.
