Marmalade and ginger muffins

A few people have said to me recently that they miss receiving recipes and musings from ‘aviewfrommykitchen’, so I thought perhaps it was time to dust off the laptop and post something delicious. I have been posting stuff on Instagram and there are quite a few recipes and ideas on my page if you haven’t already spotted them – the handle is the same: @aviewfrommykitchen

As we are travelling back to Turkey next week and I know that our Seville orange trees will be groaning with fruit, just begging to be made into marmalade, I thought a marmalade-related recipe might be timely.

This is such an easy recipe, as you just melt a few things in a saucepan, then add a few dried things, with the eggs going in last, so that they can’t scramble in the heat. I invented this recipe to use up some marmalade which had crystallised in the fridge – once melted, it was perfectly good. The semolina gives the muffins a really satisfying crunch, but if you want to make these and you don’t happen to have any in the cupboard, just replace with more flour. As self-raising flour is as rare as hen’s teeth in Kaş these days, you can just use plain flour – for each 150g flour (obviously include the semolina in the weight too, if you are using that), add two flat teaspoons baking powder (look for kızartma tozu – the stuff in the little paper packets, sold next to the yeast and vanilla – baking soda or karbonat is an entirely different thing, which you’ll find with the herbs and spices. Obviously.)

Once the muffins are baked, they are glazed with more marmalade to give them a deliciously sticky topping. You can use any sort of marmalade – I used a homemade mixed fruit version, containing pink grapefruit, which gave the muffins a pleasing bitter note. Feel free to swap the pistachios and almonds for other nuts or seeds – whatever you have in your cupboard.

Marmalade and ginger muffins
Makes 12
You will need a 12-cup muffin tin, lined

250g self-raising flour
50g semolina
½ teaspoon baking powder
150g Demerara or other light brown sugar
170g marmalade, plus 2 tablespoons extra for glaze
120g butter
100ml milk
2 tablespoons yoghurt
2 eggs
40g each chopped almonds and pistachios, plus a few for topping
2 tablespoons finely chopped crystallised ginger*, plus a little extra for topping

1. Heat the oven to 190°C fan.

2. Put the marmalade, sugar and butter in a saucepan large enough to hold all of the ingredients, and melt over a medium heat until the sugar and marmalade have completely dissolved. Remove from the heat and whisk in the milk and yoghurt.

3. Stir in the flour and semolina until just combined, then whisk in the eggs, along with the nuts and ginger.

4. Divide between the lined muffin cups and sprinkle a little extra ginger and a few chopped nuts onto the top of each muffin.

5. Bake for approximately 25-30 minutes, until the muffins are a deep golden brown and feel just firm to the touch – they will firm up a little more as they cool. Leave to cool in the tin for five minutes, then transfer to a wire rack. Melt the extra marmalade, either in the microwave or in a small saucepan (a Turkish coffee pan is your friend here), then brush each muffin with a little glaze.

*For anyone baking this recipe in Kaş, the easiest (and by far the cheapest) place to source the crystallised ginger is Muhtar supermarket, but you will also find it on the spice stall in the Friday market and in the spice shop on the corner behind the PTT.

‘Dal’ soup with spinach

My friend Jean gave me a (subtle, of course) nudge last week, about the dearth of recipes bursting forth (or failing to burst forth in this case) from aviewfrommykitchen. Hmmm, must do better.

I have no excuse for this, other than terminal inertia, brought on by having no fixed timetable for anything at all. Not to mention that our meals of late have not exactly been inspiring – there are only so many recipes you need for cheese on toast or bangers & mash.

I haven’t been entirely idle – I signed up for sourdough-baking school and my sourdough starters have never been so well-tended, or so well-used. Our kitchen is permanently coated with a light dusting of flour, and I seem to endlessly have chewing-gum-style dough stuck in my hair. We have home-baked bread almost all of the time, and our next door neighbour also gets to share – she is a key worker and deserves treats; a girl’s got to keep body and soul together in these difficult times. I also feel guilty every morning when, from the safety of my duvet, I hear the sounds of her de-icing her car, something I admit that I have never done in my 57 years until last week (even then I managed to re-ice the windscreen by very foolishly using the screen washer when we were part way down the drive to the main road – the water froze on contact with the screen, completely obscuring my view, and I nearly smacked straight into the guy from two doors down – ooops).

Continue reading “‘Dal’ soup with spinach”

Sourdough English Muffins

dsc00942-3-1Strictly speaking, these are made with the discarded part of your sourdough starter, which some careless people throw away. Because the starter has been lingering, unloved, in the fridge for a week or so, it has lost a bit of its ‘oomph’, so might struggle to provide a satisfactory rise for a loaf of bread (not that it’s ever stopped me in the past when I’ve forgotten to feed my starter). However, it is also brilliant for giving a tangy je ne sais quoi to English muffins, crumpets, flatbreads, and all manner of cakes and American-style muffins (more of which in the weeks to come).

If you don’t have sourdough starter, you can easily make these muffins with rapid-action dried yeast – directions are given in the recipe below. The flavour and texture will be slightly different, but they will still be delicious, and far superior to the muffins you buy in the supermarket. Continue reading “Sourdough English Muffins”

Sticky toffee muffins, salted caramel glaze

sticky-toffee-muffins

I haven’t posted here for a while – but I have bona fide excuses. They include: an in-built tendency towards procrastination, terminal idleness, and a pure reluctance to cook because it’s too flipping hot. (I’ve also been doing 1.5 km of laps every day while the pool is still warm enough to swim, as my shorts seem to have inexplicably shrunk during lockdown).

Yesterday I made these muffins, thinking they would slot in as an easy pud for when our friend Linda came over last night and a good thing to stash in the freezer for another day. None of them made it to the freezer, but a couple did leave the house with Linda (I only made half of the quantity in the recipe here, so we only started with seven), and we have one each to look forward to with a cuppa this afternoon. And yes, for those of you paying attention out there, making half of the quantity left me with half of an egg, which was not wasted, but used to seal the blind-baked pastry for an egg custart tart that is coming with us to our friend’s house this evening. Continue reading “Sticky toffee muffins, salted caramel glaze”

An outstandingly good potato bread

20200730_141005I’ve been planning to make potato bread ever since the Honey & Co cookbook landed in my Christmas stocking back when we were still living full time in Turkey. I’ve just checked and that was Christmas 2014. Ooops. A lot of loaves have been baked in both of our kitchens since then, but only this week have I finally managed a potato version.

I was swapping bread notes with some instagram bread-baking chums and Stefano Arturi from ‘Italian Home Cooking’ very generously shared the recipe that he uses – from the 1996 book ‘Baking with Julia’ by Julia Child. As ever, I felt the original recipe involved unnecessary faffing, so I’ve further simplified it. Continue reading “An outstandingly good potato bread”

Pizza bianca with potatoes, bacon & rosemary

IMG_20200619_122326_142It has to be said that lockdown is beginning to lose any appeal that it may have had in the beginning (the fact that it has rained non-stop for the last ten days may have had some bearing on that, I admit). I can’t remember whether we are 11 or 12 weeks in, I can no longer be bothered to count, and anyway I can’t see out from under my fringe. We remind ourselves daily that we and our families are incredibly fortunate – none of us has had Covid-19, nobody has lost their job, everyone has a secure home and we are all financially keeping heads above water – for now at least. Continue reading “Pizza bianca with potatoes, bacon & rosemary”

Vegan banana bread with candied walnut topping

Vegan banana bread (600 x 356) resizedI am fully stocked with flour again – a box containing five large bags of organic plain flour from the Cotswold Flour Mill arrived on my doorstep a few days ago. I am not intentionally stockpiling, but they are struggling with the sheer volume of orders, so are currently only delivering if you buy the entire box. Hopefully it will last me until the shops return to normal, whenever that will be. Continue reading “Vegan banana bread with candied walnut topping”

Springtime minestrone with wild garlic & butter beans

20200504_195728I have set myself a challenge of going to the supermarket an absolute maximum of once a week (though I do allow myself a quick dash into the village store to get fresh milk and fresh fruit in between). Robin is staying at home apart from our daily walk on the Bissoe Trail, owing to his advancing years and marginally dodgy ticker, so I figure that the fewer times I expose myself (and ergo him) to our new friend Corona, the better for everyone.

This means we end up with an odd collection of bits of this and bits of that in the veggie drawer, inevitably leading to either a cheesy-veggie tart or a bowl of soup. Last night we had severe storms down here on the coast, don’t you know, so soup was just the ticket. And the sourdough starter was calling to be topped up, so it seemed the perfect time to bake a couple of loaves of rye/durum wheat sourdough for dunking purposes. Continue reading “Springtime minestrone with wild garlic & butter beans”

Toscakaka (Swedish almond cake)

Toscakaka cakeWell, these are strange times. I hope you and all your loved ones are well. We should have been going back to Turkey about now, but it looks as though we will be in Cornwall until after the summer.

I am very much aware that there are worse places to be – today we were out for our daily walk on the Bissoe Trail and I think it’s fair to say that spring has thoroughly sprung. Primroses, daffodils, tulips, camelias and rhododendrons are in full and beautiful bloom – a cheering site to say the least.

Continue reading “Toscakaka (Swedish almond cake)”

Lemon poppy seed drizzle loaf

IMG_3945Appalling dearth of recipes appearing on this site at the moment – tsk tsk. I’ve been busy doing other things and also trying not to eat too many cakes and muffins, bearing in mind that shorts season is just around the corner. Also, we had a wonderful trip to South Africa last month, where we visited Amakhala Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape – we had a great time getting up at 5am (eek!) and spotting everything from groups of  beautiful nyala antelope, who visited our terrace every morning, to elephants, giraffes, zebras and a lioness with her three newly-minted cubs. Continue reading “Lemon poppy seed drizzle loaf”