You may remember me telling you a couple of months ago about my fabulous Baking Mad win for the Pudsey-fly Cakes that we made for the Children in Need Bloggers' Challenge. One of the things in the parcel was a recipe book called British Baking in 2012 : 30 Recipes To Bake This Year. It's only a thin paperbook book but it's absolutely packed with recipes that I want to try out, especially as most of them are perfectly adapted for making with the kids. (You can buy it in Sainsbury's for £2.99 or try to win one of the 1,000 copies up for grabs on the Baking Mad website here.)
I decided to use the recipe book for inspiration and adapt it according to what we had in the cupboard (which was a lot, thanks to the fabulous baking wins over the past couple of months !). The Sticky Toffee Cupcakes from the Baking Mad recipe book were therefore morphed into Drizzled Date Muffins, although the only thing I changed was the topping (the original recipe is topped with toffee butter icing and toffee chunks).
For the muffin batter, I mixed together: 175g chopped dates, 80g butter, 150g Billington's Light Muscovado Sugar, 2 eggs, 180g flour and a splash of vanilla essence.
This is supposed to make 12 cupcakes but we made actually 18 with ours and they're still a perfectly reasonable size.
This is the first time I've used Light Muscovado Sugar and I was really impressed. You may be thinking that they look overly browned but the recipe warned that, due to the sugar, they would come out darker than normal cupcakes. The sugar has a lovely caramel flavour and they have a lovely crunchiness on the top.
I was running out of butter so I knocked up a simple icing with icing sugar, a few drops of water and a splash of vanilla essence instead of the butter icing. (I was tempted to melt down some of the Caramel Flavoured Chocolate Buttons from my Baking Mad hamper of goodies, but Sophie said she wanted to keep them for something really special because the Strawberry ones were really nice so it would be a shame to waste them by melting them !) As soon as the muffins hit the plate, half of them had disappeared into happy tummies (and not just the kids - Madhouse Daddy Mike arrived home from work just at the right moment !)
There are so many lovely goodies hiding in the cupboard - silver balls, pink shimmery balls, chocolate letters, ready-to-roll icing, white chocolate chips to name but a few - that I know we'll be having many more baking escapades in the Madhouse kitchen over the coming months !
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Those look delicious! Yummo. x
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