I had bananas that were just begging to be baked. And so I made banana walnut muffin after last week’s trip to Starbucks made me eat one of their banana walnut muffins again.
My recipe:
1. 200 g salted butter
2. 3/4 cups brown sugar
3. 1 egg
4. 2 tsp vanilla essence
5. 2 cups self-raising flour
6. 3/4 cup walnuts
7. 3 large ripe bananas
And for the topping:
Mix 3/4 cup of finely chopped walnuts with 2 tbsp sugar
Steps:
In a mixer, cream butter and then add sugar. Add egg. And then the vanilla.
Then slowly add the dry ingredients, just to mix.
Spoon into muffin liners and then top with the walnut mix and bake till brown
Too much sugar. Next time I’ll cut down on the sugar.
I followed the recipe faithfully EXCEPT for the lemon extract. While the author recommended NOT to use lemon juice, I went ahead and used lemon juice and I think it makes little difference. Perhaps extract will have a more robust lemony flavour but lemon juice works just as well. My substitute was 3 tbsp of lemon juice.
Now, I wished I had lined the loaf tin instead of following the author in just greasing and flouring the tin well. I did, but half the bottom of the cake still stuck to the pan! My heart bled lemon juice seeing that. Sigh. Next time, line the tin with parchment paper, girl, I say to myself sourly.
Measure and organise ingredients. First step: in a bowl add 3 large eggs, one cup of sour cream (I used a tin of 200g), and 1 cup of caster sugar. Whisk well till combined. Once combined, drizzle in 1 cup of vegetable oil. I used sunflower. Add 3 tbsp of the lemon juice, and 2 tsp of lemon zest. And then add in the dry ingredients: 1.5 cups of plain flour, 2 tsp baking powder and 1 tsp salt. Mix to combine but don’t overmix. You will see lumps but according to the author. Don’t over mix and try to smoothen it out. Pour into greased and floured loaf tin, I really recommend lining the bottom with parchment paper. Please don’t make the same mistake I did. Bake in a 175 degree Celcius oven till cooked. It should be nicely browned and a skewer comes out clean when inserted in the centre of the cake. Transfer to a cooling rack with a pan at the bottom. Drizzle with the glaze. You should wait till it’s completely cooled but I couldn’t wait. It was fine. The glaze uplifted the cake because it’s made with 1 cup confectioner’s sugar with 3 tbsp lemon juice. This recipe is really delicious! Look at how moist it is. And very lemony!
Try following this recipe for a wonderful weekend treat! 🍋🍋🍋
To celebrate the nation’s 55th birthday, I decided to make this red and white cake. It’s meaningful actually. It’s symbolic of the historical ties we had with the UK and it was also the first cake I learnt to bake! I was only a Sec 1 13 year old girl then, and they made us do this for our Home Econs practical test. I still remember this so vividly. I was so scared of the gas oven back then, and made my partner turn it on most times. For the exam, I remember asking my mom for a dollar so I could get a purple orchid to decorate my piece. I put my purple orchid in a small vase on the tray. I never knew how much I got but I will never forget baking this cake for the exam. 😂
And now decades later, I’m baking this again. I don’t have my Sec 1 Home Econs book anymore so I scoured the net and settled on Mary Berry’s recipe. How very British. 😄
However, after this was done, I must say this recipe is really good! The cake was very moist and very soft! I couldn’t bake it as long as suggested because mine was done ten minutes earlier. But the result was perfection! Another trick I got was to buy one of those cake liners with handles! I reckon I’ll be baking now more because of these liners I got from Amazon. They were amazing and come in various sizes. You can get them here: Cake Liners
Look how they fit so perfectly! This is the best thing I ever thought of buying! The batter is so easy peasy! Just cream butter with sugar and then the eggs and flour. Oh, I did tweak a bit by adding a teaspoon of vanilla. I wonder why vanilla was not in the recipe. Bake baby bake! Not bad for a novice baker! After that, I inverted one cake and placed it on a plate. Then I added whipped cream first then the strawberry jam (because of the national flag). And then put the second cake on and dusted powder sugar all over. That beautiful plate? I got it from a UK seller on Etsy. So pretty, don’t you think? Check out that lava filling! Now, one would think I was overzealous and slathered too much. And maybe I did but believe it or not, when we started eating, we wanted more cream and jam! 😂 There’s never a thing as too much.
I really recommend Mary Berry’s Recipe. And to my country, Majulah Singapura! 🇸🇬
I’ve been wanting to make this for the longest time after watching it on YouTube by JOC – Just One Cookbook. I just love the easy way she presents recipes.
And so I did. A few problems though for the novice-ish cook.
1. I couldn’t flip the crepes. They would tend to tear so in the end I decided to cook just one side of it
2. I did the paper cross thing she did to life the entire cake. Excel that…once you lift and place it into the cling film bowl, I couldn’t seem to take out the paper underneath! It was a two person job lifting and manipulating the cake so the papers would come off
3. Our heat and humidity. By the time I finished assembling the cake, the cream has melted and they all kind of slipped off. And the more I tried to remove the paper underneath, the messier it got!
But all went well after I managed to put it in the fridge for two hours. After that, the shape held well and the cut was beautiful. And I could cover slight tears with the powdered matcha!
Can you see that huge tear? That came about as I was trying to remove the Crepe from the pan . That’s the paper which I had difficulty removing afterwards! This picture has a filter because I realise I didn’t take several good photos of the whole cake. Notice the lopsided shape? This happened because of our hot and humid weather which made the entire cake drop as I was trying to get it into shape in the cling filmBut all’s well that ends well and I love this cake! Not sweet, just the way I like my desserts, actually. Best eaten chilled! Yummy!
So I was channel surfing and caught a small segment of a food show featuring Donna Hay and some very adorable kids. They were making a carrot cake. Totally inspired, I made some for this morning’s breakfast and to bring some over for teatime later at the parents.
Try as I might, I couldn’t find the exact recipe of hers which she featured on the show. Maybe because I’ve no idea what the title of the show was! But I did find her recipes for carrot cake and carrot cake muffin. And so I used it but added some things which she did on the show – like mixed spice and ground cinnamon!
The outcome was quite delicious. It’s moist, definitely moist, but also moorish? It’s thick. Ok by Asian standards perhaps this is huge! One piece of this muffin and I’m full! But it is delicious.
I also copied her maple syrup cream cheese frosting. In the show, she added ricotta but as you know ricotta is not easily available here and Super expensive so I added one tablespoon of clotted cream instead.
I even used Australian olive oil. It’s very simple to make. The only difficult part is grating those carrots. And the recipe called for 3! I used 2 and still it was too much. I used big fat Australian carrots here. Beautiful. We love the fresh produce from Australia (I’m getting some Australian eggs later! 🤭).I followed her recipe strictly but it was way to thick. I knew it can’t be right so I added a splash of olive oil and a splash of whole milk to make it wetter. I overfilled some of them. This batter calls for exactly 12 muffins. Make sure you don’t frost all of them. Well, for us we don’t really like frosting so I only frosted three to try. The rest will be on the side for those who would like some frosting. Even my kids don’t like sweet things. Sprinkled some Chia seeds on top. A delicious teatime treat!
The Occasional Cook 