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.
Strictly 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).
I am fully stocked with flour again – a box containing five large bags of organic plain flour from the 
Well, 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.
Appalling 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. 
Turkey seems to have forgotten to do autumn this year. October has been gloriously warm and sunny, with temperatures around 30 degrees during the day, perfect for swimming and sunbathing. The jacarandas and bougainvillea are still in bloom, and our Seville oranges remain resolutely green, though the ‘donkey bees’ have finished the last of the figs that were out of our reach at the top of the tree, and have now disappeared themselves.
I know I am back home in Turkey because a) I have to have a shower or throw myself into the pool every time I’ve completed even the least arduous of chores, owing to looming heat exhaustion, and b) when I bent to pick up a towel that had blown down from the line, I realised I also seemed to be holding on to a viper. Ooops. That tends not to happen in Cornwall, though I am sure there is a first time for everything.
We seem to be making a habit of going to St Mawes – one of Cornwall’s prettiest towns – at the moment. It must be the lure of the £13.95 crab sandwiches in the pub there – or possibly not! Thinking they must be the most expensive crab sandwiches on the planet, that illusion was quickly dashed by our friend Jean spotting that the ones on the terrace at the 
One of the most pleasing things about being back in the UK is the sheer variety of fruit and vegetables on offer. Fourteen years without summer treats like rhubarb, gooseberries and raspberries have served to remind me how lucky we are in this country to have such an amiable climate – we tried many times to grow rhubarb in Turkey, but once June came along, it literally cooked in the ground. 
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