Awards, facts and muffins.

A big thank you to Gem from Cupcake Crazy Gem who nominated me for two awards last week. Two awards? Lucky me!

Rules for both the awards are:

1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award and link back to them.

2. Share 5 random facts about yourself

3. Spread the joy by nominating other bloggers

4. Convey the blogger about the nomination.

My facts are:

1. Last week somebody asked if our cat, Jimi, was pregnant. No, he is just incredibly fat!

2. I've discovered that I own 33 dresses. Some wintery, some summery, a couple for special occasions (weddings) and nearly all of them are floral.

3. My current TV obsession is Once Upon A Time (channel 5 on Sundays). It's like a cross between Heroes and Disney fairytales. Anyone else watching it?

4. I'm pretty sure I could win an Olympic event for sleeping. With no alarms or wake up calls, I can easily sleep for 12 hours straight. My personal best is 14-15 hours.

5. I think Jimmy Carr has the best laugh ever, closely followed by David Mitchell.

The people I'm passing the awards onto are:

1. Miss Cakeaholic 

2. Laura Loves Cake

3. The Baking Bee

4. The More Than Occasional Baker

5. The Pursuit of Domestic Goddess-ness

I hope you check them out, they're all great, exciting bakers.

Now onto the muffins! (Phew! This post is getting long!) I actually made these last month but didn't get round to posting them. Better late than never as they say.  I divided my batter so I could make two flavours. The first lot are apple and cinnamon muffins. I wouldn't hail these as a brilliant success, but they certainly weren't bad. I think they would have benefitted from more apples or maybe an extra flavour/texture. Walnuts or pecans perhaps.

My other batch were white chocolate and raspberry. These were the clear winners as there was only one left when I got round to taking photographs. They were much juicier and I loved coming across the half melted chunks of white chocolate, but then again I am a white chocolate fiend.

The recipe came from my first ever cookbook, Children's Quick & Easy Cook Book by Angela Wilkes. Despite no longer being a child I still occasionally use this cookbook!

115g (4oz) butter

285g (10oz) plain flour

1 level teaspoon baking powder

pinch of salt

2 eggs

85g (3oz) caster sugar

220ml (8 fl oz) milk

225g (8oz) raspberries

85g (3oz) white chocolate, chopped.

Set the oven to 200C/400F/Gas mark 6. Put the muffin cases in a muffin tin. Melt the butter in a pan. Sift the flour, salt, and baking powder into a bowl. Beat the eggs in a bowl, then add the sugar, milk, and melted butter. Add the flour mixture and fold it in. Fold the raspberries and chocolate into the muffin mixure, then spoon it into the cases (I halved the raspberry and chocolate quantities so that I could add cinnamon and a large apple to one half of the mixture). Bake for 25-30 minutes until they have risen and are firm and brown. Put them on a wire rack to cool.