The Dangers of Twitter

No, it's not a tale of public embarrassment or offended followers, of hackers or meltdowns and flame wars. This is a simple a cautionary tale; Twitter is bad for your waistline! A few days ago @JustTeaching posted a link to a tempting recipe for carrot cake muffins. Well they sounded too good to miss, so today I gave them a go. They were incredibly easy to make and even easier to eat. I made them with spelt flour and three teaspoons of gluten free baking powder so that my mum (who is wheat intolerant) could try them too. Even with these amendments they were delicious. I would recommend making half the amount of icing suggested in the original recipe because it made a huge amount, and also using low fat cream cheese as it made no difference to the taste. Below is my tweaked recipe along with photo of the finished product. For those who need to know, it makes 12 muffins at 9 Weight Watchers ProPoints each.

Carrot cake muffins

Ingredients for the muffins (makes 12 @ 9 ProPoints each):

• 1 ½ cups grated carrot (about 2 mid - biggish carrots)

• ¼ cup oil

• 2 eggs

• 1 cup soft dark brown sugar

• 1 cup of self-raising flour

• 1 teaspoon baking powder

• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

Ingredients for the icing

• 200g icing sugar

• 100g low fat soft cream cheese

Method

1. Mix all ingredients together

2. Place in cup cake cases in muffin tin bake in oven at 160℃ for 30-35 minutes.

3. Allow to cool on wire rack

4.  Beat cream cheese, add icing sugar and mix until smooth and thick

5. Pipe or spread on top of muffins

Concerts and Cupcakes

No posts for a while - I have been up to my armpits in 'stuff'. It's taken a lot longer than I expected to get through the heap of school work, and as for the home stuff, well I am only just starting to tackle that!

Still, only 8 days until the freedom of the summer holidays. I am counting the hours. Meanwhile I am trying to acheive the status domestic goddess! I made cakes for my class cake sale tomorrow and for the Roding Players concert last night. My first attempt at lemon cupcakes and they disappeared fast, so I'll make them again!

There is still plenty going on; domestic goddess status is hard to reach with the flat turned upside down. My bedroom is currently being refitted and decorated and all its contents are stuffed into the corners of every other room. At least I know it is getting worse to get better!

At school we still have the dance festival to get through. This year I am putting up 4 dances and starting to think that it was a very daft idea! Then of course there is class 4's cake sale to raise money for The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association. I still need to sort out my class assembly on Wednesday and at some point I'll be meeting my new class!

With all of this going on, blogging has taken a bit of a back seat and I haven't even started to get my head around Final Cut Studio yet. Still, hours of entertainment for the holiday!

Fun with Cupcakes

I made these! Yes, they are probably the simplest of all cakes to make and hardly require any skill, but I still feel rather pathetically proud of my pretty pink creations. They really taste very good too. Now I'm wondering, with more practice and the purchase of some icing tools, could I turn this into a miniature cottage industry? Maybe I'll have a cake and think about that!