Back To School

This week I started my new job teaching Food Technology at a Cambridgeshire Village College so I baked some carrot and pineapple breakfast muffins to take with me and eat on the go:

The recipe was from the September 2009 issue of Good Food magazine. I thought they were really tasty, kept well and stayed moist. (I put twice as much mixture in each muffin case than the recipe stated as it said it would make 12 and I wanted to use my 6 muffin silicon and was feeling lazy and not inclined to put two rounds of batter in the oven).

The only fiddle was having to boil, mash and cool the carrots befooe adding them to the muffin mixture, I think next time I'll try grating them in raw. I also put in 45g oats and 40g plain flour as i didnt have the 85g of Wholemeal flour the recipe required, but that didn't seem to matter!

Carrot and Pineapple Muffins
Makes 12 - 239kcals per muffin.

Sift together 140g self raising flour, 85g wholemeal flour (reserving about 2 tbsp of the bran), 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda, 2tsp ground cinnamon and a pinch of salt.
In another bowl, beat 150ml sunflower oil with 100g golden caster sugar.
Add 200g mashed cooked carrots, 3 canned pineapple slices, cut into cubes, 2tbsp pineapple juice rom the can, 1 egg and 1 tsp vanilla extract.
Mix in 50g sunflower seeds.
Fold the dry mixture into the wet one.
Cut out a dozen 10 cm squares of non stick baking parchment and place in the holes of a muffin tin.
Spoon mixture into tin, sprinkle with bran and a few sunflower seeds.
Bake at 200c/180c fan /gas 6 for 20-25 mins or until a skewer comes out clean.
Leave to cool.