Cooking without recipes is a great way to reduce waste in the kitchen because it helps to use up all sorts of odds and ends. Soups, stews and smoothies are the obvious starting points, but, as your confidence grows, you can learn to adapt trickier recipes such as baked goods to use up a wider range of the ingredients in your pantry. My five-year-old daughter loves to invent recipes with me, and we recently made muffins using some brown bananas (her idea) and a variety of flours, dried fruit, nuts and seeds.
Magical pantry muffins
Although the Lily Cafe blogger Kat suggests adding two to four tablespoons of sugar per egg to your muffin, I like to extend the ratio and add one part sweetener, instead, making the ratio “double two, triple one”, which is still easy to remember. Although some baking recipes need to be very precise, muffins are a little more forgiving, so get inventive, experiment and see what works for you. And don’t forget to note down your recipe in case it’s a corker and you want to make it again (and if it’s not quite right, you can adjust the amounts next time).
You can use any glutinous flour, though if you opt for plain flour rather than self-raising, you will need a raising agent, too (a teaspoon of baking powder per 100g of flour should be about right). I used whole spelt flour with baking powder. The liquid element covers water, milk (or plant-based alternative) and mashed or pureed soft fruit or vegetables, such as brown banana flesh, or apple or pumpkin puree. The fat, too, should be liquid – for example, melted butter, vegetable oil or olive oil. As for the eggs, an egg weighs about 50-60g, so if you are making a small batch of muffins with, say, 200g flour and liquid, you will need two eggs (ie, just over 100g), but if you have a little more or less, don’t worry: as I said earlier, this recipe is forgiving. And as for the sweetener, just about any will work, from sugar or honey to maple syrup.
Any extras (added to taste) are up to you: chopped or whole dried fruit and nuts or seeds, chocolate chips and other tasty nibbles are always welcome in a muffin. Even slices of raw fruit such as apple, pear and peach, studded throughout the muffin or just on top, are also lovely. I recommend adding one to two parts of such extras, but make sure they’re in pieces rather than blended into the muffin mixture.
I line muffin tray holes with little squares of unbleached baking paper, which I simply push into the greased holes. This removes the need for using muffin cases and gives the muffins a nice rustic aesthetic where the corners of paper poke up.
2 parts flour – 200g self-raising flour (or 200g plain flour plus 2 tsp baking powder)
2 parts liquid – 200g mashed brown bananas, apple puree, milk, yoghurt
1 part liquid fat – 100g melted butter, coconut oil or olive oil
1 part eggs – 100g eggs, or about 2 medium ones
1 part sweetener – 100g sugar, honey or maple syrup
Chopped nuts, seeds, chocolate etc, to taste
First gather and weigh out all the different ingredients using the magical muffin ratio 2:2:1:1:1 – that is, parts flour, two parts liquid, one part fat, one part egg, one part sweetener.
Put the flour, raising agent if using (and 100g sugar if you’re not using a liquid sweetener) in a large bowl. In a second bowl, mix all the wet ingredients, including the fat, eggs and any liquid sweetener.
Mix the wet ingredients into the dry until just combined, then fold in any chopped nuts, seeds, dried fruit and/or chocolate to taste (we added a handful of seeds, chocolate chips and cranberries, and saved some to decorate the tops.
Divide the mixture between the greased and lined holes of a muffin tin and bake in a 210C (190C fan)410F/gas 6½ oven for about 20 minutes, or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.
Remove and leave to cool in the tray for five minutes before devouring, or take out of the tin, cool on a wire rack and store in a suitable airtight container.
