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!

Chocolate Pumpkin Cake

We still had several pieces of the roasted pumpkin left in the fridge today, so I made it into a chocolate pumpkin cake with chocolate glazing. The taste of the cake is predominantly chocolate, the pumpkin is there for moisture and texture. If Alex was not so averse to nuts and raisins, I would have added some to the cake too, I love my cakes full of stuff :)

Ingredients 

• 320 g roasted pumpkin
• 2 eggs
• 200 g sugar
• 80 g sunflower oil
• 220 g flour
• 20 g cocoa powder
• 10 g baking powder
  

Beat the eggs with the sugar and the oil. Add the roasted pumpkin and mix. Gradually add the flour, mixed with the cocoa powder and the baking powder.  The resulting batter is fairly viscous and sticky. Pour it in a  baking form and bake in a preheated oven at 180C until a toothpick, stuck in the center of the cake, comes out dry.

Alternatively you can pour the batter into muffin forms and bake the cake into muffins - this mixture should produce about 20 average size muffins.

Let the cake completely cool and then make the chocolate glazing. I melted 50 g of milk chocolate over boiling water, added 20 g milk and 10 g butter and generously poured the melted glaze over the cake.

Serve with coffee or tea and enjoy!

Chocolate Leaves

The icy weather, which hit Europe these last 10 days, has been keeping us home, the children are enjoying extended Christmas holidays and I am knitting like crazy and baking. Yesterday I saw a tutorial on how to make chocolate leaves and I couldn't help it but try it today. It is such an original idea and so easy to make. All you need is chocolate and leaves.

As leaves are a bit scant right now, I used four yellowing leaves from my small home-grown lemon grove. To make chocolate leaves you melt the chocolate, cover the bottom side of the leaves with the melted chocolate using a small brush and leave them to cool in the fridge. Then you carefully peel the real leaf and you get a stunning chocolate leaf to be used for various decorations.

I made four test leaves

and used the rest of the melted chocolate to cover a few of the honey biscuits I had just baked.
The recipe for the biscuits, because husband loved them so much:
Ingredients:

• 150 g butter
• 100 g powdered sugar
• 2 egg yolks
• 300 g flour
• 1 tbsp honey
• cinnamon, ginger, ground nutmeg

Beat the butter with the sugar, add the yolks, the the flour, the honey and the spices and mix. Make small balls from the dough, flatten them slightly and place in a baking tin, covered with baking paper. Bake in a preheated oven at 180C.

Divergent Chocolate Cake

I'm not a fan of the Divergent movies and frankly, I do not plan to read the books, but when I came upon this Dauntless themed cake only days before Gaby's birthday, my hands itched to try it - such a simple but brilliant decoration idea!

This is the video you want to check out for the decoration, and for the ingredients I used the recipe in this Bulgarian blog.

The "ashes" are crumbs from the cake.

The logs are chocolate filled waffles:

The flames are caramel. I melted about 75 g of white sugar and poured the hot liquid caramel with a spoon on cooking paper and waited for it to cool.

And I added small brown sugar candies for the coal:

Amazingly, it not only looks cool, it's actually super delicious, it was a smashing success as a birthday cake. Yummy! :)))

Cappuccino Muffins

While browsing through Pepa Stoeva's cooking blog, I was inspired to make some muffins. Pep-40's blog features a variety of muffin recipes and as an avid chocolate and coffee lover my first natural choice were her cappuccino muffins. However, as I usually do, I changed the proportions for my muffins, reducing the oil and increasing the sugar - I do like my sweets less oily and very sweet! Other than that I followed her preparation instructions and both the mixture and the baking came out very successful.

Here's my interpretation of the recipe:

• 240 g flour
• 180 g sugar
• 1 pocket of instant cappuccino (12 g)
• 1 tea spoon of instant coffee
• 2 tea spoons of cocoa powder
• 1 pouch of baking powder (10 g)
• 2 eggs
• 200 g milk
• 80 g vegetable oil
• 50g white raisins

Preparation:

• Mix the flour, the baking powder, the instant coffee and the cocoa powder in a bowl. 
• Stir the eggs with the sugar, add the oil. 
• Dissolve the instant cappuccino in the milk and add the cappuccino milk to the egg, sugar and oil mixture. 
• Add the dry flour mixture to the liquids and stir. Add the raisins and stir some more.
• Preheat the oven at 180C.
• Distribute the paste into the muffin forms and bake for 25 min at 180C.
• Serve with coffee and enjoy.

This recipe gives 18 average size muffins (70 mm baking molds). My form is small, only 12 molds, so I used additional 5 silicon molds, which are a bit bigger. Next time I plan to adjust the recipe for just 12 cups, so we would eat them up faster and try some other variety - the possibilities seem countless.