English Muffins

The technical challenge from Great British Bake Off Week 2 was English Muffins. I found the recipe and got to making these. I haven't made muffins before but since I'm a regular bread baker I thought it looked fairly similar and I had all the ingredients. The recipe can be found here. 

The recipe basically requires adding everything in a bowl and mixing it together until you get a dough. You are supposed to turn the mixture out on to a floured surface and need it untill smooth and soft. This is the step I found the most challenging. From watching the program there were people saying you shouldn't add too much flour and just keep kneading until it all comes together. Well my dough was so sticky that it just stuck to my hands and surface, I had put some flour down but this was quickly absorbed by the dough. After around 10 minutes my dough was lovely and smooth and it was certainly a different texture, however, it was still stuck everywhere. In the end I decided to use flour to pull it off everything and make the dough more solid so I could form it into a ball and put in a bowl. In hindsight I probably could have just put the sticky dough in the bowl and pulled it off everything but it was what I did at the time. 

Before it had proving time

The dough is left to double in size, around 1 hour, and then turned out onto a surface and rolled to 1.5cm thick. I found this tricky because the dough kept shrinking back when I rolled it. I had to be quite persistent and then the first time I underestimated what 1.5cm was and had to start again. Eventually I got it to the right thickness, left it to rest for 15 minutes and cut out the muffins using the cutter. I left the muffins for 30minutes to prove. 

Cut and ready to prove

I cooked my muffins in a frying pan so I heated that up first. I made the mistake of not reading the recipe and had my pan on a high heat and not a low one. This meant that when I added the muffins they got burnt on one side as I was trying to cook them through. I realised and turned it down and then flipped them over. It's really difficult to know when these are cooked so I left them on there as long as I could and just guessed. 

Burnt on one side

The verdict: If this was my technical challenge I certainly wouldn't have come first, I made so many stupid mistakes throughout the recipe despite having all the details in front of me. The muffins were cooked through to the centre and I thought they tasted quite nice, if you ignore the burnt side. Overall it's not something I'd particularly like to make again, I may do if required but I'm not inspired by having done it once. I would give my muffins 5/10 and the recipe could have done with a little more help on certain issues, like the dough. 

Cooked all the way through

Blueberry and Orange Muffins

Todays recipe from Annie Bell's Baking Bible is from the Muffins, Cupcakes and Fairy cakes chapter, Blueberry and Orange Muffins. I didn't adjust these at all this week, just used the recipe and it worked very well.

It was a very simple recipe, as all of the recipes from this book seem to be so far. First step was to mix together the orange zest, juice, oil and eggs.

Stir in the dry ingredients and mix until all the flour is incorporatated. 

Batter mix

Stir in 2/3 of the blueberries. Fill up the cases and then scatter the remaining blueberries on top. Place in the oven to cook. 

In the oven

Once cooked leave them on a rack to cool. 

Cooling

And then enjoy!

Finished product

The verdict: I enjoyed these muffins, the texture was really nice and the blueberries had broken down well in the oven to give a lovely moist texture. I probably didn't enjoy them enough to make them again but they were ok. I would give them 7/10 and Gary also gave them that score.

Choc-Cherry Muffins

I wanted to make some cakes for Gary to take back to work, his first day after having m&m, so I looked through my vast pile of waiting recipes and chose this one. Choc-Cherry Muffins, I took the recipe from the BBC Good Food magazine but it can also be found here. 

The recipe is very simple and it's basically just a normal cupcake recipe to start with. Cream the butter and the sugar, add in the eggs and finally the flour. The chocolate comes in the form of chopped up plain chocolate, this is stirred into the cake mixture. Once this is light and fluffy then it is placed in muffin cases, I made 16 from this recipe. 

Fluffy batter ready to go in cases.

The recipe states you should use tinned cherries, however, these aren't sold in our Tesco so I used frozen cherries that I'd defrosted throughout the day. The cherries are added to the muffin cases, once the mixture is in there, and pressed into the batter. I added around 3-4 cherries per muffin, this meant that there were plenty of cherries left over and I certainly didn't require the quantity stated in the recipe. 

The cakes were then placed in the oven and cooked for 25 minutes, for once the timing on the recipe was actually correct and the cakes were beautifully cooked after this time. I got them out and left them to cool on the rack. 

Cakes ready to eat..yum!! 

Verdict: I gave these muffins 9/10 and Gary gave them 8/10. They were really tasty with the chunks of chocolate and cherries. With each bite you got a different flavour and the combination was really good. Gary took them into work and his colleagues also agreed that these were very good. It's a shame I don't have more to eat :(. 

Banana Muffins

It's been a little while since I've been able to do any baking so with my semi day off today I decided to make the next thing on my list from Jo Wheatley's book, Banana Muffins Page 148. 

The first obstacle I had to overcome was lack of buttermilk. There was none in the local shop, therefore I improvised and added lemon juice to milk, apparently this is pretty much the same thing any way. It worked ok I think. As usual I used flora instead of butter but apart from that I tried to stick to the recipe. 

Mashed bananas

The first step is to make a crumble topping for the cakes, it's just the simple flour, sugar, butter and little spice. As usual mine wasn't crumbly enough and turned into a moist paste, however, I tried to use it anyway. 

The next step was to add all the dry ingredients together, and all the wet, and the combine the two. It was very easy and didn't even need the electric whisk just fold it in. 

I decided to make cupcakes instead of muffins so the portions were smaller and I could make more. I had to fill the cases quite high to use up all the mixture so in the oven they did slightly rise out. Place the crumble mixture on top before placing them in the oven. 

I'm not exactly sure how long the cakes took to bake as I wasn't watching the clock but it did seem to take quite a while and even now I'm not sure as they seem too moist and stuck to the case. 

Cakes fresh out of the oven

The second tray... there might be one missing!!! 

I agree with Jo that these are lovely and simple to make, I don't have any children to try and make them with but I'm sure this is a recipe they would enjoy with the mashing and the stirring. The banana taste is subtle but tasty and the crumble mixture gives a lovely crunch to the top of the cakes. It's a shame it stuck to the case and I lost half of the cake through that. 

The finished and cooled down product

Overall it was a tasty cake but not perfect, I'm going to mark it 6/10, ok but certainly not amazing. My husband is at work at present and won't want to eat something so unhealthy so for today this mark will be out of 10.