I rarely post entire recipes, mostly because everything I make is yanked off the internet anyway and I can just link to the originating post. But I will make an exception for these truly mouthwateringly stupendous apple muffins from (where else) smitten kitchen, because I don’t think it’s so much a solo recipe as a technique.

The magic of this set of instructions is that gives you an amazing base for any kind of fruity muffin. I plan to try it with apples and blueberries, peaches, and bananas – unless my colleagues get sick of muffins first…

I have even converted the ingredients to sensible metric measurements, for your convenience!

Apple Muffins
Makes 12 large or 18 medium muffins

140g whole wheat flour
140g all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon cinnamon
113g unsalted butter, at room temperature
95g granulated sugar
95g dark brown sugar, packed
1 large egg, lightly beaten
236ml buttermilk or yogurt
2 large apples, peeled, cored, and coarsely chopped

1. Preheat the oven to 230°C. Grease and flour muffin cups.
2. Mix together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.
3. Cream the butter in a large bowl. Add the granulated sugar and 42g of the brown sugar. Beat until fluffy.
4. Add the beaten egg and mix well. Mix in the buttermilk gently. (If you over-mix, the buttermilk will cause the mixture to curdle.) Stir in the dry ingredients, then fold in the apple chunks.
5. Divide the batter evenly among the prepared muffin cups, sprinkling the remaining brown sugar on top of each muffin.
6. Bake for 10 minutes, turn the heat down to 200°C, and bake for an additional 5 to 10 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean. Cool the muffins for 5 minutes in the tin, then turn them out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Recipe Notes

• I used all plain flour because I had no whole wheat. It was still yummy, but I suspect it would be even better with whole wheat.
• If you don’t have buttermilk (I didn’t), substitute a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar + however much milk you need to make up the 236ml. Let the mixture sit for 5 minutes before using it.
• I used light brown instead of dark brown sugar. It was fine.
• 5 minutes baking time after turning the heat down to 200°C was enough for me. Muffins came out perfect.
• I used an electric handheld mixer for every mixing step up to the buttermilk. I handmixed that plus the dry ingredients, and then gave it another quick blitz with the electric mixer before adding the apples.
• Speaking of buttermilk, when you get to that step, you may feel (as I did) that something has gone horribly wrong because it won’t mix properly. The butter-and-egg mixture kind of floats in the liquid in clumps. Do not panic. It will all even out once you add the flours.
• If you check out the comments at smitten kitchen, you will see that this recipe is virtually endlessly flexible, e.g. you can use sour cream/yogurt instead of buttermilk, doesn’t matter if you have no egg, can sub applesauce for half the butter, throw in a banana or some nuts if you like… really, go wild!

Red Velvet Cake is one of life’s great mysteries (to me). It has an unpinpointable taste that makes it impossible to describe what kind of cake it is. I don’t think it’s chocolatey enough to be chocolate, and it’s not a butter cake, nor a sponge cake, nor a pound cake. Also, it owes its renown pretty much entirely to red food colouring, which is ridiculous considering that you could red-food-colour almost any other cake you want. You could even have a red cheesecake if that floats your scarlet-loving boat. And as Deb of Smitten Kitchen (where I got this recipe) points out, red velvet cake could be any other colour you want, so this red thing is really kind of mindboggling.

But, as is also observed by Deb, people loooove red velvet cake. I freely admit to feeling an inexplicable attraction towards it, even when I know that this is an attraction borne entirely of artificial colouring. People especially love it when it is baked in cupcake form. Here in the UK, I suspect this is due to the famed Hummingbird Bakery’s version of it (they do do a cake form but I far more often hear people talk about their red velvet cupcakes). And as I was after an impressive dessert recipe for my colleagues to commemorate my last days of work at my current theatre, I decided I should finally give red velvet cake a go. I shan’t reproduce the recipe here because I pretty much used the one from Smitten Kitchen word for word (except for some quanitity adjustments for a smaller cake), but I shall have a good long rant about the painstaking process that is cake-baking…

Which segues nicely to how not to bake a cake, point 1: when a recipe tells you to lump some butter in the bottom of your pan and place pan in oven “for a few minutes until butter melts”, don’t let your butter burn, as I rather stupidly did! If you, like me, associate the smell of burnt butter with popcorn and movies, this will make your cake smell of popcorn and movies. And taste a little like it too (the bits of it that came into contact with the burnt butter bottom, anyway). Point 2: when the recipe says to line your pan with parchment paper, there’s probably a reason for it… it would’ve made my cake NOT taste like popcorn, at the very least >__>

I also struggled almightily with the components of the recipe itself. Who has 3 cake tins lying around? Seriously? Well I don’t… and on top of that, the UK doesn’t contain cake flour, canola oil or white vinegar. Cake flour I can understand because I’ve never heard of it in my life, but canola oil and white vinegar definitely exist in Singapore (the oil at least I’m sure of!), so what gives, London? I wound up reducing the recipe by one-third and making it one fat layer instead of a few, then slapping all the frosting on top of my one fat layer, and using vegetable oil in place of canola, the latter of which turned out to be an icky mistake :/ it’s not as disastrous as it could’ve been. But there’s definitely a strange, lingering, oily aftertaste to the cake. Argh! Next time I shall try it with rapeseed oil instead, which is apparently the closest thing the UK has to canola (and I didn’t bother doing this research before going out grocery shopping, because I had no idea canola oil didn’t exist here… annoying country differences).

In the absence of a standing electric mixer with a bowl that the recipe called for, I had to make do with a handheld mixer instead. I don’t think it really made a difference in the end, but I did find myself having to juggle a lot more things at one go. Oh and I had no white vinegar. Did I mention that already? I highly doubted that malt vinegar would be quite the same, so I substituted lemon juice, which… I suspect wasn’t strong enough because the expected tangy taste is barely there at all. I suppose it is quite possible that my lemon juice, being Tesco house brand, is of substandard quality.

And then! After all was done and the cake was in the oven, and I had washed up and wiped the table and was feeling good about it all, I realised to my horror that I had forgotten to add vanilla to the cake. Cue panic removal of the cake pan from oven, throwing in vanilla, and mixing it up in the pan itself, totally ignoring the fact that it had started to bake and bits of crusty top were forming. Alas. I don’t know if this really affected the cake much, but I would rather advise that you not do it if possible to avoid…!

Happily, it didn’t turn out all disastrously – the middle of the cake (i.e. everywhere that didn’t touch the popcorny burnt-butter sides and bottom) actually tastes pretty good. If you, erm, try to ignore the faint oily aftertaste. And the cream cheese frosting is golden. This is hands down the best frosting I have ever made in my life. Not that I’m very experienced at frosting, but this is really, really good, and so easy; I’m definitely nicking the same frosting for other cakes!

My last day of work at the current place isn’t till next week. I had deliberately made an early trial run of this cake with the idea in mind that I would definitely screw up and need a second run to perfect it for my colleagues T____T I can’t decide whether I’m happy or not to have been proven right. But at least it doesn’t taste so terrible that I can’t eat it. And now that you all know what not to do when making red velvet cake, you can all have a good laugh at me and hopefully go off and make lots of lovely red velvet cake yourselves with Smitten Kitchen’s fantastic recipe, which I can sample in future ♥

Flu sounds so trivial, but when you have it full-blown it is the worst feeling ever. I spent the entirety of this morning and afternoon in bed (waking up briefly to have a bowl of soup for lunch, use up all my tissue and Lemsip, and then go back to bed). It was pretty surreal. I wonder where the day has gone, and I am suffering mild panic from having only done one (ONE) job application the whole week because I have been ill/lazy/unable to find a lot of jobs to apply for in the first place.

It was a rare low point for me today… I like to think I’m pretty upbeat, and I don’t often get despairing sorry-for-myself feelings of being a failure and wanting to throw in the towel, but today they briefly hit. I don’t really know why. It was probably a combination of having been idle almost the whole week, feeling physically dreadful, and not having much to look forward to jobwise.

In the spirit of thankfulness, however (inspired by Steffy’s blog), yesterday I had a very enjoyable dinner at Tokyo Diner with the unlikeliest bunch of old acquaintances :) and I’m looking forward to next week – long, long overdue night out with ex-colleagues Hannah and Vanessa, some front of house volunteering, meeting up with Eunice, dinner with Charmain, and Oxford over the weekend! Excited.

And now, carbonara recipe time!

I wanted to post this anyway because it was so fantastic, but I’m glad there is popular demand for it. As a bit of background: authentic Italian carbonara does not contain cream. I’m not even sure if it contains egg whites. I suspect it doesn’t, and it’s only meant to be cooked with egg yolk – which is why I avoided it for such a long time (I don’t like separating eggs, I always end up throwing out the unused half cos I don’t know what to do with it). But the other day I came across this recipe which didn’t involve separating eggs, and I tried it out immediately.

As I never measure anything, these proportions are taken from the link above:

600 grams spaghetti or bucatini
120 grams guanciale or pancetta — diced or cut into strips
1 clove garlic
2 medium eggs (very fresh)
100 grams mixed Parmesan and pecorino Romano (or all pecorino) – grated
olive oil
salt and pepper

1. Boil your pasta till al dente. Drain. Save some of the pasta water.
2. While the pasta is boiling, beat eggs in a bowl with a pinch of salt and some cheese.
3. Peel your garlic clove and fry it with the guanciale or pancetta in a pan till the meat is on the verge of becoming crispy. You don’t have to add oil to the pan if there is enough fat on your meat. I never do.
4. Add the drained pasta to the pan and toss with the guanciale/pancetta.
5. Lower heat to minimum. Add the egg mixture and toss well. Be VERY careful not to let the egg set or cook because you will have scrambled egg with pasta if you do so. If it looks too dry, thin it with pasta water.
6. Remove from heat and add the rest of the cheese plus salt and black pepper to taste. Serve immediately.

Some notes

My proportions were all out of whack, but essentially they were: 2 servings of pasta, 205g pancetta (which was too much, but that was the amount my pack contained and I didn’t want to have like 2 tablespoonfuls of pancetta sitting in my fridge), 3 medium eggs, and a lot of cheese. I like cheese.

I didn’t have pecorino Romano, so I only used Parmesan. I think it makes a difference, so the next time I will try it with both cheeses. Also I had run out of garlic, so I skipped that. It turned out fine, though I adore garlic and I’m sure it would’ve been better with.

For extra droolsome flavour, turn down the heat before you add the pasta to the pan, and throw in a generous splash of white wine while your guanciale/pancetta is still sizzling. Let this reduce till you get a delicious syrupy winey liquid, then add the pasta. I didn’t do this in this recipe because I had no wine in the house (sob), and it is probably grossly inauthentic anyway, but I usually do it when I make carbonara and the wine imparts a terrific kick. I’m not enough of a gastronome to properly put it into words, so all i can say is it tastes really good.

This recipe does not reheat well. Obvious on hindsight, but I’m not the brightest bulb in the box, so I reheated it the next day and wound up with exactly what you’re not supposed to (scrambled egg pasta).

The bottom line… carbonara typically feels too heavy and sickening after a while because of the addition of cream (an American adulteration). The egg way produces a much lighter, more palatable dish. And it was really the best carbonara I’ve ever had, ever. I tend to serially order carbonara at Italian restaurants because it is by far my favourite pasta, and I’ve had a lot of carbonara, but I feel like I can’t have it with cream any more after trying this.

Let me know how you get on with it if you try it out!