Cinnamon Chocolate Diet Muffins

I like SparkPeople, it has some good tips and articles, plus being able to record your intake and exercise is really useful.

The one frustrating thing with it is the fact that most of the recipes are written in American. I'm gradually working out how to convert Fahrenheit (or just 'degrees' as it's often listed, burnt a few things making that mistake) to gas mark and cups to real measurements. As ranted about here. but one of the problems thats hard to get past is the random products that seem to exist only in America and that also seem to be really popular with dieting sites in general.

What is the obsession with apple sauce? It's a thing you buy to put with pork, leave in the cupboard and then throw out when it gets manky. Seriously, search on a site like mysupermarket and you'll find three varieties - 'own brand', 'cheap own brand' and Colmans. Considering that sugar is the third ingredient in each case I doubt it would be classed as diet food. It must be one of those things that doesn't export well, like canned pumpkin puree.

I found this recipe for Applesauce Oatmeal Muffins on SparkPeople, but had no real desire to make applesauce from scratch, so I replaced it with Nutella (any Hazelnut Chocolate Spread would do, check your calorie count not all spreads are created equal). I also replaced the two egg whites with one egg as it seemed like a waste of eggs.

The end result is a mildly chocolatey but very satisfying muffin for only 119 calories. And they freeze well so a batch will last a while.

Candy Christmas Treats

[I'm not Christian, but the people I made these gifts for celebrate the winter season on the 25th so that makes these Christmas treats.]

I love Bakerella. Soooo many awesome, beautiful treats. Sadly most of my baking attempts do not turn on as lovely looking as hers. Partially due to laziness i using my iPhone camera for everything instead of my Nikon, partially due to generally cooking failure.

But I fell in love when I saw this project - Cowgirl Cookies - Mix Things Up! I like cookies! I can bake cookies! I can put things in jars! Huzzah!



Unfortunately one thing I don't love is the American cup system of measurement. I know we all get used to the system we grow up with and I'm usually pretty tolerant of wierdnesses, but this one makes no sense to me. How are cups easier than scales? If you're using a cup to measure with (unless you're shoving stuff out of a large container) you have to use a spoon to fill it, have to keep refilling it rather than just measuring once, you have to wash it out repeatedly if you're using wet ingredients and (somehow) I always end up with flour in my shoes. It's frustrating.

So anyway, since I was making three jars and I didn't want flour everywhere, I measured the ingredients in cups for the first jar, weighed them in the scale and then wrote down the amounts. Made everything much much faster for the other two jars.

Note, if you're going to use the same method, do it properly. Do not assume that a cup of flour is the same weight as a cup of M&Ms. Unless you melt them, M&Ms do not fill all the space in the cup. Same with the chocolate chips and, to a lesser extent, the oats. Guessing won't work. I had three lovely American friends try to work out the measurements without weighing and the guesses varied from the results by as much as 50g.

I couldn't find any seasonal M&Ms, I don't think they exist in the North of England so I bought ordinary M&Ms and spent an hour separating the colours. The pecans are all in the lid space of the jar.

Sadly, my printer refused to co-operate on the labels, and these streaky results were the best I could get.

I did make a half batch of cookies with the left over ingredients, but I forgot to halve the amount of butter and ended up with very tasty, very sticky gloop. Sorry no photos of that :p

Banananananananana Bread

Three weeks ago it was 30 degrees Celsius (84 Fahrenheit?) in the UK. In October. That's like saying there were herds of wildebeest running through the Yorkshire Dales, it just doesn't happen.

Fast forward to today and its 6 degrees (42 Fahrenheit I think), which is much more normal but also a shock, coming so soon after nice weather. So now it's time to cook roasts and bake cakes and anything else that gives me an excuse to stand next to a hot oven :D

A few weeks ago I discovered that one of the local corner shops discounts their bananas to 10p on a monday morning to get rid of them before the new stock arrives. Logically - cheap brown bananas = tasty banana bread time. In a lovely bit of coincidence my friend KKHymn had the same idea on the other side of the planet, check out her post here.

Since I also suffer from a chronic illness I have to pick simple recipes too. For me the American 'cup' measurement system is a huge amount of faff compared to just using scales, plus I don't eat nuts so I chose a different recipe - Shelley's Banana Banana Bread from AllRecipes.com. I find it very difficult to clean blenders and such so I just mashed the banana into chunks with a fork. I think that helped keep the bread nice and moist without the addition of soured cream. I did throw in some vanilla extract though.

The real secret of fantastic banana bread? Smear a thick layer of nutella on it. That's true for most things though.