52 Recipe Challenge - Week 3.

This week was a week of birthdays, the first birthday of my two cats Frankenstein and Tuxedo.

As well as my sister’s birthday, although I won’t say how old she was that would be rude.... because it was her birthday and she had invited me around to hers, so I decided to bake something I thought she would like to eat as my recipe this week. That is why I decided to try to make apple and cinnamon muffins as she is a great lover of the cheesecake shop’s apple cake. This recipe is from the Bristol Community Cake Book which I received for my birthday and wanted an excuse to use and this occasion seemed perfect!

To Make these muffins you need:

1 Apple

Milk 1/2 pint or 1 cup

Vegtable/ sunflower oil 80ml or 1/3 cup

1 Egg

Brown sugar 90g or 1/3 cup

Self Raising Flour 120g or 1 cup

Baking powder 1 teaspoon

Oats 90g or 1 cup

Raisins 150g or 1 cup

Nutmeg 1 teaspoon

Cinammon 1 teaspoon

To start off with I preheated the oven to gas mark 6 (or 200c on an electric oven), made a cup of tea and lined my muffin tin.

  Then after a few swigs of my tea I got all the ingredients and equipment out that I needed and glanced over the recipe which seemed simple enough.

The recipe called for 1 apple but I had two apples which had some bruising on them which I decided was the equivelant of one once the bruised areas were removed.The first thing I did was start to peel the apples and whilst doing this I read the recipe more and realised that it was measured in cups not grams or ounces and that I don’t have measuring cups...

So I nipped away for a minute to find conversions on the internet and for the flour, oats, milk, sugar, raisins and oil. After that was sorted I finished peeling and chopping the apples.

Next I measured the flour, oats, raisins, baking powder and sugar before putting them in a bowl and adding the apple so that it was covered in flour.

In another bowl I added the milk, oil and egg, the recipe didn’t say to do anything with them but I thought it best to give them a little whisk.

Once I had done that I put the flour and apple mix into the bowl with the egg and milk mix and stirred them together. It was at this point I started to worry that I had measured the cups wrong as the mix was a lot runnier than my normal cake and muffin mixes. I looked the recipe over again and remembered that I hadn’t added the nutmeg and cinnamon so I did that and although it didn’t make the mix any less runny it made me panic a little less.

After mixing all the ingredients together I spooned the mix into muffin and bun cases and put in the oven for 20 minutes until they were cooked.

Then quickly popped them in a tin for the journey to Nottingham.

The muffins recipe for the muffins was a good one and if you had measuring cups I'm sure would be very simple but I think I’m not quite there with the cup measuring system yet and they didn't really rise as well as I'd have liked them too.  Despite this they tasted very nice and you can pretend your being healthy eating them however; they're not going to be a competitor to the Cheese Cake Shop's much beloved Apple Cake anytime soon!