Christmas decorations, food and music shouldn’t be played before the 4th of December. For the past couple of years I have stopped using shops that started “celebrating” too early, unfortunately this now means I can’t set foot in a shopping mall until December.
So you may wonder why I am blog a cranberry dish so early in November? Well the truth is when I saw these fresh cranberries in the supermarket, I had such a hankering for this recipe, I just had to make it.
Can you believe that before today I had never tasted a chestnut before? I remember playing conkers as a child, but I can’t have been very good cause I didn’t even seem to remember what they look after the tough brown outer layer is removed.
With the last of my pumpkin I decided to make muffins, as although I love muffins I only have one blog post on them, the eponymous Coffee Muffin Recipe post.
Recently I have been hearing about the US canned pumpkin shortage but American’s don’t know how easy they’ve got it – I can’t find canned pumpkin anywhere! This makes it more difficult to follow the dozens of Pumpkin recipes out there on the interwebs, so I have had to adapt this Pumpkin Muffin Recipe from Smitten Kitchen.
The brown butter adaption is something that has been running about in the back of head for some time, I loved the idea of a nuttier buttery taste. This recipe like most muffin recipes use oil instead of butter, but I figured that substituting melted butter would work just the same.
The links in the recipe below, take you to subsequent pages of this post that explain how to make each ingredient from scratch.
~ makes 12.
Preheat the oven to 180oC or 350oF. Line a tin with muffin cups, or in my case fairy cake liners.
Add the pumpkin, brown butter, spices, sugar, baking soda and salt (if using), from reading the recipe Smitten Kitchen suggests mixing with a whisk as makes it much harder to over mix.
In another bowl mix the flour and the baking powder. Whisk the flour mixture into the pumpkin batter, until mixed through.
Pour the mixture into the liners making sure each one is around 3/4 full, although I had some extra batter left at the end so I just topped them all up.
Sprinkle on top of each muffin the cinnamon sugar.
Pop the tray into the oven for around 25 to 30 minutes, until they are golden and puffed up. Leave them to cool in the pan for 5 minutes and then allow them to cool further on a wire rack.
When the muffins were ready I was astounded by the wonderful orange colour, so vivid but so natural. It was a beautiful moist muffin, and the spices were just perfect.
I am not sure if on top of the different spices and the pumpkin I could really taste the brown butter in the final muffin, but I could definitely smell it when they were cooking!
This is definitely our favourite muffin recipe in a while, definitely a keeper.
I have been really impressed with the amount of eating you get in a pumpkin, there is hardly any wastage. The pumpkin seeds may actually be my favourite part.
Curried pumpkin seeds can make a really quick and light snack, perfect instead of a bag of crisps or bag of minstrels while watching Xfactor on a Saturday night!
Not revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination, but this a quick dish that uses mainly store cupboard ingredients but can use up leftover meats and vegetables.
Getting a pumpkin in the UK isn’t as easy as you might imagine. The only variety I saw in Tesco was of the carving variety, and I am guessing that not quite the same as baby bear, crown prince or delicata.
More like pumpkin-grown-for-size-and-not-taste. The last thing I wanted to do was waste my one organic pumpkin.
Over the past few weeks I have heard a lot about different pumpkin recipes like pumpkin brownies and pumpkin cupcakes.
A watched macaron never grows feet.
Or you could say a Coffee Muffins macaron never grows feet. I am writing this blog post munching on failed coffee macarons and feeling pretty sorry for myself (and just a little sick). Five attempts and still no feet.
The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.
This time I have no one to blame, I can’t blame the challenge for being too easy or not seasonal enough, or any one of the other reasons why my previous challenges haven’t been good enough. This time I really tried, gave it different attempts over different weeks and yet I have little more to show for myself than after my first attempt.
Looking back on my first attempt, I may have actually got worse…
Pomegranates always make me think of nights when it is pitch black outside, the fire is on, and I’m sitting in the living room with my mum and sister watching ER. My mum would sit with a pomegranate and divide it up passing over chunks of the bejewelled fruit to each of us.
Seeing pomegranates in stores always provokes that memory but it has been years since I’ve actually bought one, yesterday I finally took the plunge and bought two.
I read this recipe on potato crust quiche and something in my head just snapped into place. I love quiche, but I dislike the ones I buy in supermarkets. I’ve made my own quiche once and while it was good, the shortcrust pastry didn’t exactly go to plan.
Seeing the potato crust idea was like aligning the stars, I could have homemade quiche without the extra hassle. It is also generally healthier using potatoes rather than pastry 🙂
The October 2009 Daring Cooks’ challenge was brought to us by Jaden of the blog Steamy Kitchen. The recipes are from her new cookbook, The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook.
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Pumpkin Muffins