It’s only mini! So I will eat thirty.

Recipe: Chocolate Orange Christmas Mini Muffins

Time Taken: An hour-ish

Ingredients: a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, 150g plain flour, a pinch of salt, a tablespoon of baking powder, an egg, 50g sugar, 50g butter, 120ml milk, and decoration :)

Evening readers!

Today issss… Well, it’s Saturday (The weekend! Dance around!) and it’s FIVE DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS. YEAHHHHHHH. I am more than A LITTLE excited now about Christmas. It’s been building and, today, I can confirm that I’m definitely excited. Officially. I’m in the festive spirit. And nothing will stop the song in my heart. Literally, I have sung all day. A medley of Christmas tunes. And some dance anthems thrown in to remind me of Newcastle. The hobs on the oven have been my discs. KITCHEN RAVE.

Though before I got down with the appliances, readers, I should report that the Christmas food shop was tackled this morning. There was a war waged between Morrison’s and my dad’s wallet. We made it out with not one trolley-related injury, high five! And we got EVERYTHING ON THE LIST. Possibly for the first year ever. And we got so much more, readers. We bought the shop. And it’s a joke because the kitchen here is so small we can’t even fit a microwave. So our arrival home, readers, was sort of a lesson in ‘How best to stack ten tins’ and ‘What’s safe to keep by the bleach’ and so on. There was a lot of “Christ, I knew we already had the parsnips!” and such. But we did it! And it’s all safely in the kitchen. Just about. THOUGH NOT FOR LONG. Muahahahahaha :D

And, once more, through my haze of festive cheer… I was inspired to bake! Today, I really wanted to get my bake on again. PLUS, I had an actual excuse to justify some baking. For once, a real reason why there was probable cause to bake! Such a rarity! See, tomorrow is another big present-swap family-meet-up function affair. This time for all of my dad’s girlfriend’s family brood. And I’m invited! I’m not really central to this clan, but I enjoy going along to their do’s. They’re a lovely bunch. So I’m going along and attending as my dapper dad’s plus one. And as I have no presents to hand out, I’ve baked some goodies for me to give out instead, for his girlfriend’s lovely family. :)

*Drumroll*… I’ve baked chocolate orange mini muffins, readers! Yes I have! I to-tally invented this recipe earlier, while feeling a little crazy, and it’s been a hazardous bake… but successful! With its many pitfalls, this was definitely one to share on the blog. I have to remind you all OCCASIONALLY that I’m not perfect in the kitchen. :P 

So, my original logic for this revolutionary recipe was:

1)      Even though it’s samey to yesterday’s baking (see my ‘Cookies from Darkest Peru’ blog post) I love chocolate orange flavours and we’ve got loads of Terry’s and shit in, so I definitely wanted to do something to involve them.

Who could say no?

2)      We have very few other ingredients in the house (the baking cupboard is also the cereal cupboard in my dad’s ridiculous kitchen).

There's about this much room in there

3)      In the kitchen, I discovered little gold and red candy cups, bought when making fudge last Christmas. How could I involve these?? Hmmm… AND SO MY RECIPE WAS BORN.

Some might say...

So, to rustle up tour own real life chocolate orange mini muffins CHEFBEHERE STYLE, here’s what you do…

1.       Heat your oven to 200ᵒC.

2.       Line a baking try with 30 or so candy cup cases.

3.       Measure your flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl.

4.       Heat your butter and a quarter of your Terry’s Chocolate Orange together in a saucepan until both are melted and mixed into chocolatey goo. Leave to cool.

5.       Measure your sugar into a large mixing bowl and crack your egg into this bowl.

6.       Chop up another quarter of your Terry’s Chocolate Orange, into small pieces.

7.       Add your melted butter mix to your egg’n’sugar bowl and stir it up!

8.       Place a sieve over this bowl and sift your flour mix through your sieve, so that it lands gently onto the batter below. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

9.       Pour your milk into this bowl and use a wooden spoon to fold everything together.

IS MAGICALLY TRANSFORMED INTOOOO...

10.   Add your chocolate chunks and stir in (I did forget, yes, and had to chuck the chunks over my mini muffins just before they went into the oven – DON’T BE A COTTON HEADED NINNY MUFFIN LIKE ME).

11.   Take a teaspoon and scoop a small amount of mix into each of the candy cups, so that they just aren’t quite full.

ChefBeHere Top Tip: I pretty much filled my candy cups with mix and then it went and rose a tremendous amount, overspilling some of them! So play it safe, and make more of them rather than exploding a smaller number. Put a little mix in and I GUARANTEE it will rise.

12.   Safely transport your mini muffins into the oven to bake for ten minutes. Get some dishes washed really quickly while they do. Go on.

13.   When your muffins have risen and turned golden brown, get those babies out of the oven!

14.   Rest them somewhere safe to cool (If any made muffin love in the oven and have become one, you should just be able to pull them apart using your hands while they’re warm).

15.   Melt the remaining half of your Terry’s chocolate orange, either in the microwave or in a bowl held over a saucepan of boiling water.

"I'm meltinggggggggggg!"

16.   Use a teaspoon to drizzle a little chocolate over each mini muffin.

17.   Before the chocolate has time to set again, sprinkle some kind of decoration on top!

ChefBeHere Top Tip: I deployed crumbled pieces of chocolate orange brownie for decoration today. If you aren’t lucky enough to have brownies in the kitchen to crumble, you could use those little sugared orange slices that come in tubs with lemon slices? Or you could whip out the chocolate sprinkles, perhaps? Or pop a chocolate button or a magic star on each mini muffin? You don’t need a lot as they’re so small, but it’s nice to do something to decorate. Especially if you’re giving these as gifts, like I am.

18.   You’re all done! If you’ve baked these for a Christmas party, arrange your mini muffins artistically on a platter and pop them out on the buffet or offer them around to guests. If you’re giving them as gifts (like me!), find some takeaway tubs out that will fit your mini muffins and design a bunch of playful tub labels, to remind people what it is you’ve baked for them when they’ve forgotten after a few drinks. If you’ve made these all for yourself, pick your most splendid-looking mini muffin to start with… and tuck in! Yolo.

Here’s my babies all ready in their boxes for tomorrow!

And here was the mini muffin saved just for me! I say 'was'...

And there you have it, readers. Another delightfully tempting and terribly indulgent bake. Straight from the ChefBeHere kitchen. This recipe was a little crazy along the way, and I know my mini muffins rose so much they didn’t come out looking tidy. And the eagle-eyed among you will have spotted that I stuck my brownie chunks on using writing icing in the end, having burned my melting chocolate in its pan. Again. I KNOW. I was too distracted with my singing! What’s a girl to do. But, despite ALL THAT… I think they’ve come out good!

Readers, I ate one: it tasted gorgeous. They look crazy but not… offputting?? Have you been put off by the photo them? I don’t think so. No! I think people will still want to put these in their mouths. I hope they will. Come on, they’re not that bad! They’re nottttt! THEY’RE MADE WITH LOVE. There you have it. And tomorrow I will be handing them over with love, and not worrying what people think of them. Because they aren’t. That. Bad.

I think this bake demonstrates, readers, that one key to a successful bake in the kitchen is just confidence. Approach your recipe with confidence, be confident that your baking you’ve produced is top-notch (it probably is!), hand it over like you owned it in the kitchen, hold your head high and as long as you aren’t poisoning anyone then all will be fine. At least you tried.

And you should! You should go try this recipe, readers. Go have a shot at it! Because when you’re not overfilling candy cups and forgetting about your chunks, then BURNING the bloody chocolate, you could be crafting some upstanding mini muffins, I believe.  So please, please, go try this recipe out and let me know how you get on. Can anyone make this work?? Can you bake some gold standard mini muffins using this recipe? Is the recipe still decent, despite all my song-related shenanigans in the kitchen? Ready. Set. BAAAKE! 

Sing (don’t singe) my superstars

And always be safe,

Hayley

CHOC-NAN-ICOT... WHAT?

Recipe: Chocnanicot Muffins, I call them

Time Taken: 1 hour

Ingredients: 150g marg, 250g sugar,3 eggs, a teaspoon of vanilla extract, 2 ripe bananas, 250g plain flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder, 125g ground almonds, 150g dried apricots, 150g plain chocolate aaaaand either one big chocolate cookie or a few small cookies

 

 Hi readers,

Today, it’s Wednesday! It’s another day in the big run up to Christmas. For me, another day of general laziness and festive cheer. You can’t begrudge me this, readers, because after I graduate in June I’m probably going to be working for the next 50 years of my life. And some of those years I might have to work on Christmas Day! The horror! So I’m allowed one last good Christmas. And I hope, whether working or not, you’re having a good Christmas season, too. :)

 

So this morning I was reading the news headlines, keeping up with the world beyond this house, and I read about a student from Lancashire, called Dominique, who lost her bank card on a night out this December and was offered £3 by a homeless man, called Robbie, (this was the last of his money!) to get a taxi home. Dominique didn’t take Robbie’s money but she was really touched by his offer. 

And so, soon after, Dominique started asking friends and family and so on, to each donate £3 towards raising the money to help get Robbie somewhere to live. She also slept rough for the night alongside homeless people such as Robbie, in order to raise further money for the cause. And Dominique’s raised over £20,000!! Isn’t that incredible?!

I’m so wowed by what she’s done! As my friends at uni and my family at home know, I struggle a lot with the cold at winter. Up in Newcastle, I’ve been really worried this year about the homeless people near our university library. It’s been bitterly cold and all the students trudge past them each day to go sit in a heated building, and they’re often still there when we come out at the end of the day. I don’t know how they can bear it. 

And I know there are a lot of people in need around the world, and a lot of people in need in the UK. And you can’t help everyone blah blah. And the actions of some homeless people may have contributed towards them becoming homeless blah blah. But it’s bloody awful. And I hate that I don’t have the money to buy the people hanging out around the library a cup of coffee, at least. Something warm. When I have a proper job, I’m going to try to buy a homeless person a hot drink every day in winter.

So today, in my warm home, I’ve been baking up a storm for my family. And I hope I inspire you to do some baking too! It’s good for the soul. :) But I was thinking, maybe, if you don’t have enough friends and family to feed 12 muffins to, is there someone in need that you could offer a muffin to?  Maybe you could make someone’s day by being generous beyond belief, and offering them a home baked muffin? 

Plus, if this isn’t for you (and sadly I don’t know where to find people living on the streets in Woodhouse) or you’ve been really taken up to help people in need this Christmas, there are loads of ways you can spread some magic in December! You could help out at a soup kitchen? You could spend some time with an elderly person on your road? If it snows, you could even help them to shovel their front path? You can make such a difference with your time.

Also, I found a really cool website where you can donate £5 to cover the cost of a birthday cake being baked especially for a child in Sheffield, whose family is finding it hard to provide one on their special day. Isn’t that the best idea ever? Check it out: http://www.freecakesforkidssheffield.com/

Anyway, I’ve said my piece. And I hope that, this December, some of you might be thinking about the people who don’t have lovely homes to go home to. I know I will. And I wish them all the best for getting through Christmas. 

And now I can tell you about my baking!! Today, readers, I had the itch to do some serious baking in the kitchen! But I’m really broke so I was strictly limited to the ingredients we have in the house. This is normally a big issue, but I was pleasantly surprised!! The lovely mother has come through, and stocked up for my visit home. :) In the end I decided to combine banana, apricot and chocolate… in a moment of muffin-inspired genius!

To rustle up some of your very own Chocnanicot Muffins, follow these 20 simple steps…

1.       As it’s very nearly Christmas, pour yourself a drink. Why not?

2.       Line a muffin tray with 12 muffin cases.

3.       Prep your apricots! Measure out 150 grams of them and chop them up into quarters using a sharp knife.

 

4.       Prep your bananas! Peel them both and use a fork to mash them up.

 5.       Prep your chocolate! Break it up into pieces in a bowl.

6.       Prep your cookie! Use your hands to crumble it up into tiny pieces in a bowl.

7.       Heat your oven to 180°C.

8.       Measure your marg and sugar into a large mixing bowl. Add a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Then crack your eggs into the bowl. 

9.       Stir it up!

10.   Now stir in your mashed bananas. So much goo!

11.   Place a sieve over your bowl and sift your flour and baking powder over the mix. 

 

12.   Stir it up!

13.   Add your ground almonds and your apricot chunks.

 14.   Once more, stir it up!

15.   Spoon  your mix evenly between your 12 muffin cases until they’re all mostly full.

 16.   Transport safely into the oven to bake for half an hour. Catch a show on TV!

ChefBeHere Top Tip: The ad break of your show (I was watching Friends) is the perfect time to turn your muffins around in the oven so that they’re facing a different way, just in case some are baking quicker than others.

17.   When your muffins are golden and well risen, take them out of the oven and leave to cool.

18.   After a while (and maybe another drink) stick your chocolate in the microwave to melt for a couple of minutes. Don’t let it burn, mind.

19.   Spoon your melted chocolate evenly over each muffin.

20.   Sprinkle your muffins with cookie crumble for decoration! Serve to your adoring friends and family, and then anyone else you’re feeling generous towards.

It wasn’t to be this simple for me, readers. Disaster struck on Step 18 when I burned my chocolate in the microwave. It wasn’t fit for use whatsoever, and we had no more chocolate or no icing sugar in the house. What a nightmare! However, I got inventive and managed to melt some marshmallows in the microwave, stirring hot chocolate powder into the marshmallow goo little by little, and I used this instead of melted chocolate to stick my cookie crumble on to my muffins with. Phew!

Here’s my marvelous muffins!

What do you think? Impressive, huh? I’m so proud!! Decoration is not something I normally bother with. My baking often flies straight from the oven shelves into the mouths of hungry flatmates. And it’s such a shame! I’m so glad to day that I took the time to do something on top of my muffins. Even inspite of the disaster I had in the kitchen. Because they look so pretty!

Now, I can’t yet report on how these babies taste. They’re under lock and key, being saved for pudding after our tea later. But hopefully they taste as good as they look! As I was botching various recipes together, and turning loaf recipes into muffin ones, I was a little uncertain about whether these angels would rise or not or whether they might even explode, but I hit it on the head apparently. Who knew. They domed to perfection! 

So… go! Shoo! Stop drooling over my photos and go bake your own muffins! Do it! If you don’t have the apricots you can sub in any other dried fruit. And if you’ve already overdone the chocolate this Christmas, you could drizzle glace icing over your muffins and stick a piece of dried banana on top, there’s your decoration! Let me know how this one turns out.

And remember, always, to be grateful for the kitchen you bake in.

Bake safely this Christmas amigos,

Hayley