Sugarless Apple Muffins

Last year, on a whim, I decided to stop eating sugar. I love sweets and although I am certainly not overweight and have no health problems, related to sugar consumption, I thought it would be a beneficial experiment health-wise and I was also curious if I could do it. Initially it was only for a day, then a week and now it has been more than six months. 

I'm not religious about not eating sugar and my restrictions apply only to processed sugar, by which I mean that I eat a lot of fruits and dried fruits; it's not a carbohydrate restricting diet, just an abstinence from packed sugar as much as possible.

Even before summer last year, I rarely ate store-bought sweets, my morning coffee was accompanied mostly by home-made desserts. Lately I've been experimenting with my own recipes, replacing sugar with dried fruits. I should mention, that I am not a proponent of artificial sweeteners and I believe in reducing the craving and need for sweet taste by reducing the consumption of sweet taste. I can confirm, that my receptors for sweet have actually changed during these months and I can taste sweetness much more acutely.

I came up with these apple muffins last week and this is my second batch, husband polished most of the first one himself, and he hasn't been on my sugar-free regime, so it should be a testament, that they are delicious enough :)

Ingredients:

• 1 egg
• 40 g sunflower oil
• 100 g yogurt / sour cream
• 150 g / average apple chopped
• 100 g dried fruits (25 g of each raisins, cranberries, dates, plums)
• 120 g flour
• 5 g baking powder
• pinch of salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, clove

Preparation:

Beat slightly the egg, add the yogurt and vegetable oil, mix. Add the dried fruits (cut the dates and plums into small pieces) and the apple, chopped into small pieces. Finally mix in the flour with baking powder, pinch of salt and spices.

Distribute the batter into 12 muffin forms and bake in a preheated oven at 180 C for approx. 25 min. Serve with hot coffee or tea.

Strawberry Cake with Crumbs

This recipe and these photos have been waiting publication for over a month and I'm finally finding a couple of minutes to upload and write down the recipe.

I've already made this cake repeatedly, only a couple of days ago I tried a new version with chocolate chips in it - the best according to my taste, and it is recently one of the preferred cakes in our family.

What makes it so unique is the perfect combination of fresh fruit, sponge cake and buttery crumbs on top, but I should add, that it also works with frozen fruit - not as juicy, but still quite good.

Ingredients:

For the sponge cake:

• 2 eggs
• 100 g sugar
• 80 g vegetable (sunflower) oil
• 120 g milk
• 200 g flour
• 10 g baking powder

For the crumbs: 

• 30 g butter
• 2 table spoons flour
• 2 table spoons sugar

Preparation:

Beat the eggs with the sugar. Add the oil and milk, mix. Sift and add the four with the baking powder and a pinch of salt. I also add vanilla.

Pour the batter into your baking dish. Half the strawberries and arrange on top. 

To prepare the crumbs, grate the cold butter and mix it with the flour and the sugar, until you get buttery crumbs. Spread them on top of the cake.

Bake in a preheated oven at 180C for approx. 20 min. Serve with tea or coffee, best in the morning with your Duolingo lessons :)

These can also be made into muffins, if you don't mind the additional work :)

My Favourite Muffins

In the days before Christmas we got a package we had ordered on AliExpress, containing 500 muffin liners. And that's how it all started :)))

I began experimenting with a simple vanilla muffin recipe, trying to perfect it to make exactly 12 puffy and delicious muffins. 

After several iterations, I found this to be the final (so far) perfect proportion of ingredients:

• 180 g flour
• 200 g sugar
• 2 eggs
• 100 g yogurt
• 80 g milk
• 40 g sunflower oil
•  pinch of salt
• 5 g baking powder + 2 g baking soda
  

To the above I might add vanilla, chocolate drops, cocoa, lemon zest, grated chocolate, raisins, nuts, etc.

Preparation: Mix and stir the wet ingredients. Add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture and stir. Distribute in 12 muffin forms and bake in a preheated oven at 200C for approx. 20 min, until a toothpick test shows the muffins are done.

 I've made these entirely chocolate flavoured, adding 25 g cocoa to the mixture

I tried them with lemon zest, lemon flavour and lemon icing

I tried them marbled

and even with pears in a cake form. And they tasted perfect with coffee every time!

Face Masks

It seems the coronavirus crisis is going nowhere anytime soon, Sofia is under lock down, there are no masks in the pharmacies, so yesterday I sewed a bunch of reusable cotton face masks. The pattern and the instructions are here, but there are many other patterns and models out there.

My fabric is 100% cotton ranforce (densely woven cotton fabric) and one of the masks is made of 100% cotton shirting. The masks have two layers of cotton fabric, elastic, which pulls the mask behind the head (much more comfortable than behind the ears) and nose wires to fix the mask closely to the face. The removable and disposable inner filters are dried wet hankies. I went to the supermarket today and tested mine, it works as fine as could be expected, I suppose. After usage I threw away the filter, washed the mask thoroughly and I will iron it after it's dry.

The weather has been actually good to us - winter is back with a vengeance and staying at home is not so bad, when it's cold and snowy outside :)

And I made some comfort food too - it's so sweet and chocolaty, that if not from coronavirus, we risk dying from chocolate (hope not!).

I improvised the recipe and it came out quite good:

• 2 eggs
• 1 cup sugar 
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1/4 cup cocoa
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking powder

For the frosting:

• 1 tbsp soft butter
• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 2 tbsp milk

Mix the batter, pour into the cupcake forms and bake in a preheated oven at 180C. Leave to cool. Mix the frosting and distribute on top. Enjoy and stay safe!

Muffins with Chocolate Spread

 
A simple and very delicious recipe for muffins with chocolate spread I found on facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/fattoincasadabenedetta/videos/1382929211751118/

I followed the recipe almost to the dot and the result is quite satisfactory. However my chocolate filling was not that runny, probably because I did not use Nutella.

Products:

• 2 eggs
• 150 g sugar
• 50 g sunflower oil
• 80 g milk
• 230 g flour
• 8 g baking powder
• chocolate spread

The interesting part is that the chocolate spread is first frozen and then placed in the muffin and covered with a spoonful of batter. The muffins are baked at 180C in a preheated oven.

Next time I'll try the recipe with jam.

And a picture of the handmade Christmas cards Gaby made for a charity. I love them all!