Guest-starring... Jaffa Cake Muffins.

So, I'm currently a little laid-up after an operation on my knees...so I've called upon the services of my dear boyfriend to provide me with a guest-post (read: he wanted to make muffins. I gave him a recipe. They turned out well. I preyed upon his love of Jaffa Cakes and muffins and bullied him from 10,000 kilometres away to give me a guest-post). Anyway, here we go!

-----------------------------------------------------------------

It’s a great honour to be invited to make a *guest post* on Alia’s food blog; the only logical next step is running a three Michelin-starred eatery in the Lake District, surely. 

Please be forewarned; I am not a very good cook. I’m not completely useless; if I had to sum up my culinary ability, it’d be “ham handed” (the joke is that Alia doesn’t eat ham DO YOU SEE). If Alia and I ever embark on a joint cooking project, I’ll usually be relegated to “De-shell these pistachios” or “Put this wine in this glass”; it’s humiliating, but ultimately it’s for the best. 

As such, I shall be presenting a recipe which has a very favourable risk-reward ratio. In other words, it’s foolproof (me being said fool). We’re making JAFFA CAKE MUFFINS HELL YEAH!

If you want to follow in my stumbling, incompetent footsteps, you’ll need the following:

·         125ml vegetable oil
·         Two eggs
·         Two 35g pots of chocolate mousse (I’m pretty confident that you could use chocolate custard instead, if that floats your boat)
·         250g of plain flour
·         Two teaspoons of baking powder
·         150g of caster sugar
·         75g of light brown sugar
·         One orange
·         JAFFA CAKES

                 Oh god, I should have emptied that grease tray before taking this photo. My grease is my shame.

Dump the “dry” ingredients (flour, both kinds of sugar and the baking powder) in a mixing bowl.

In a separate bowl, combine the eggs, oil and chocolate mousse.

                                                                           Appetising

Cut the orange in half and force-choke the juice out of that mofo.

                                                                          RAAAAARGH

Grate the skin of the orange to get your zest (previous, harsh words/beatings from Alia reminded me to STOP AT THE WHITE BIT), and add that to your bowl.

Now, attack it with a fork until it’s smooth, then pour the contents into your mixing bowl.

At this point, Alia would tell you to “fold” the wet ingredients into the dry ones. I’ll let you into a Kitchen Secret – I think that’s just a fancy way of saying “mix”. Together we will BREAK DOWN THE WALLS OF OPPRESSIVE COOKING JARGON, comrades.

Ok, now grab your jaffa cakes!

                                   PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE HALF-EATEN JAFFA CAKE BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Take your knife and let those tiny cakes Know True Suffering. It’s not exactly a precise science to work out how many jaffa cakes you’re going to want in your mixture as a whole (retrieve your jaws from the floor, dear readers), but I ended up using about seven. There was definitely room for more, though, so your mileage may vary. 

Anyway, get your jaffabits (patent pending) in your mixture, and baptise them in your Holy Batter (I don’t know; shut up).

From here, just spoon the mixture into muffin cases and whack them into your muffin tray. If you’re concerned that there isn’t enough sugar in this recipe (there is), feel free to sprinkle some light brown sugar on top. I won’t stop you, but your arteries might.

Bung it in the oven. At 200°C in a fan-assisted oven, they should take around twenty minutes. 

OMG THEY ROSE! YES WE CAN! YES WE CAN! Sure, one of them was clearly overfilled and spilled over the edge of the muffin tray, but rudimentary, delicious cosmetic surgery sorted it out.

So yeah, that’s it. Easy but rewarding stuff. The muffins were soft, with visible jaffabits inside; finding little bits of orange jelly inside brought tears of joy to my pathetic, engorged face. There’s obviously massive scope for varying this recipe, and with that in mind I’m currently drawing up a mental list of alternative fillings (early frontrunners: “Boost” bar, Jammy Dodgers, Malteasers, haggis).

If you’ve honestly learned something about baking from this post, consider me incredibly flattered. If you haven’t, congratulations: you’re a competent cook!

EPILOGUE: I’d totally forgotten that Jaffa Cake Muffins already exist!

Faced with almost certain copyright infringement (trust me, I’m a lawyer), I did what I would advise a client to do in the same circumstances: DESTROY THE EVIDENCE.

...No, not really – in actual fact I’d left the bowl on the hob and my flatmate’s girlfriend accidentally melted it. My story’s better, though.

------------------------------------------------------------

So there you go! Give the muffins a go and hope you enjoy them  :)