I found this recipe for easy banana, raisin, oat and honey muffins at delicious. They are a tasty way of using up overripe bananas and a good breakfast muffin option.
This is a particularly good recipe if you don’t have a stand mixer or electric beaters to help you as there’s not a lot of stirring involved.
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This lemon curd swirl sponge cake is easy to make and has great lemon flavour
I wanted to make a lemon cake, but I’ve been disappointed in the past with recipes which produce a sponge with only a hint of citrus rather than a decent lemon flavour. So I decided to experiment and come up with something myself. I adapted one of my favourite recipes – for raspberry ripple sponge cake – to make it using lemon curd. And it was a success!
This recipe gives a beautifully fluffy sponge packed full of lemon flavour. It also happens to look rather pretty without the need for any extra decoration after baking.
Ingredients:
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Ingredients (for 8 snowman)
By “nutella” I mean hazelut chocolate spread. I always use the supermarket’s own version because it’s so much cheaper and just as good. The recipe I used from BBC GoodFood is for a circular baking tin, but I used my rectangular tin and it baked fine, although far more quickly. And if you’re thinking “cinnamon, yuck!”, you can always use only 1 tsp in the mix. But the cinnamon flavour in the finished cake is very subtle, even when using 2 tsp.
If you’re not from the UK, you may not know that it’s traditional here to celebrate the night of November 5th with bonfires and fireworks. This cupcake decoration idea – using chocolate flakes to create the firewood and piped orange buttercream for the flames – is another one I saw a photo of on Pinterest and decided to give it a try.
The cupcakes
Use your favourite cupcake recipe! My recipe index has lots of cupcake recipes if you need some ideas. For example: caramel cupcakes, yoghurt cupcakes and brownie cupcakes.
I used my golden syrup sponge cake recipe. I used the same quantities of ingredients for making a loaf cake, but divided the mixture between 12 cupcake cases and baked for 20 minutes at 180 degrees C (160 fan, 356 degrees F, Gas Mark 4) until risen and golden.
Decoration ingredients (for 12 cupcakes)
I saw this Halloween oreo spider muffin/cupcake decoration idea on Pinterest and decided to give it a go!
The muffins
Make whatever muffins are your favourite. You could make cupcakes instead. My recipe index has lots of muffin and cupcake recipes if you need some ideas. For example: chocolate fudge muffins, snickers muffins or Halloween brownie cupcakes.
I made plain vanilla sponge muffins: 4 eggs (large or medium), 8 oz (225g) self-raising flour, 8 oz caster sugar, 8 oz butter/baking margarine and a tsp of vanilla essence/extract. Beat together the butter and sugar until fluffy, stir in the eggs until combined and finally fold in the flour. Divide the mixture into your cases (12 muffins or 24 cupcakes) and bake for about 20 minutes at 180 degrees C (160 fan, 356 degrees F, Gas Mark 4) until risen and golden.
Decoration ingredients (for 12 muffins)
I can’t believe I haven’t made this golden syrup sponge cake before. It’s absolutely delicious and I can’t recommend it highly enough! I got the recipe from Baking with Granny.
And if you can resist eating it all for a couple of days, it would make a brilliant dessert: serve a slice warm with ice cream!
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Ingredients (makes 20-30 truffles depending on how big you roll them)
Method
This is a quick, easy recipe I found on GoodtoKnow. I used a lot of strong coffee and the coffee flavour in the cake was still subtle, so don’t worry about going too far.
I very rarely make bread or anything involving yeast. Mainly because I haven’t the time for mucking about with proving. But when I found this recipe from GoodtoKnow for chocolate Chelsea buns, it sounded straightforward so I thought I’d give it a go.
Traditional Chelsea buns contain spices and sultanas. This is a sweeter twist on the classic recipe.
I didn’t have enough chocolate hazelnut spread, but did have some salted caramel sauce to use up. And so that’s why my version contains chocolate and caramel. You can just use the chocolate hazelnut spread if you prefer.
Ingredients (makes 12 chocolate caramel Chelsea buns)
