Monthly Archives: April 2010

Dreaming of an earth oven…

The baking blogosphere is packed with earth ovens, ancient and new, found all over the world. They are a reminder for those of us with electric ovens stuck in the wall that bread making is an ancient craft practised for centuries if not millenia.  I wish we had made these at school, maybe some enterprising teachers make them now.  I came across a guy the other day who had taken a small group of children out to the woods for a picnic. He was engrossed in firing a tiny home made oven made out of an old thermos flask on which he was cooking hot dogs for them, fuelled by twigs and leaf litter.  They were having such a good time!

I spend too much time dreaming and not enough time doing, but if you are a bit like me then Breadhunter‘s blog is a great place to spend some time and dream and maybe find inspiration. I think I’ll put myself down for a copy of that book when it comes out. …

Stem Ginger and Dark Chocolate muffins


50 minutes from thought to eating. If you were organized you could probably do it in 30 but I am just not that quick!  It finally rained today so now the weather is back to normal, we needed muffins for tea! I have reduced the butter and increased the milk in this recipe by a little as I am trying to cut down on butter.

From a recipe by Diana Bonaparte in Mad about Muffins my favourite muffin book! Loads of other wonderful recipes in here, including B’s all time favourite, mint choc chip muffins and many, many more!

Preheat oven to 170 C Fan. Find muffin tin with 12 compartments, find muffin cases, find the rest of the ingredients and off you go…..

The wet stuff: two parts to this:

  • 110 grams unsalted butter
  • 100 grams dark chocolate

Melt 100 grams of dark chocolate  and 11o grams of unsalted butter in a pan or the microwave on a low heat just enough that the butter melts and stir until smooth.

In the meantime mix up in a separate bowl:

  • 1 egg
  • 100 grams plain yoghurt –  (I used homemade)
  • 160 grams skimmed milk

Then add the butter-chocolate mix to the egg mix, or the other way round, just make sure the chocolate isn’t too hot or you will end up with scrambled eggy bits.

Whizz 2 nuggets of stem ginger, the sort that comes in syrup in a jar, in a food processor, or chop finely and add to the wet mix as above.


The dry stuff:

  • 260 grams of plain flour (all purpose)
  • 200 grams light brown muscovado sugar (sieved to get rid of the lumps)
  • 10 grams ground ginger
  • 1 and a half tsp of bicarbonate of soda
  • a pinch of salt

Sieve these together and mix well in another bowl. You now have one bowl of dry and one bowl of wet ingredients

Filling and topping – weigh these out before you mix the wet and the dry together!

  • 150 grams dark chocolate, chopped up roughly or use choc chips
  • one more nugget of stem ginger finely sliced into 12 slivers

OK, all set! You should have one bowl of wet stuff, one of dry stuff, one little bowl with more chocolate bits in it and a saucer with some slices of ginger.

Fold the dry mix into the wet mix, work quickly, don’t beat it,  just mix it enough that the flour has just disappeared, more like folding than beating. The batter can look quite lumpy which is fine!  Then quickly fold in the second lot of chocolate bits.  Spoon the batter  into the paper cases. Put a sliver of stem ginger on top of each one and bake for 20 – 25 minutes. Mine took 25 minutes because I think I made a bit more mixture than I meant to and so the muffins were quite big! They are done when they are well risen and spring back a little when you press them.

Cool on a wire rack but don’t wait too long to eat them, in fact invite someone round for a cuppa and then you can eat two while you are talking to them and no one will notice!

For an easy to print version of this post click here

Wild Garlic update…

Lynne has sent me this great pic of her wild garlic spaghetti dish!

Wild garlic pesto spaghetti, roasted vegetables and parma ham by Lynne

She makes the pesto with no cheese…

take a few handfuls of wild garlic, a handful of pan roasted almonds, juice and rind of 2 lemons and a glug of olive oil and a teaspoon of salt…pulverize to within an inch of its life in the processor (otherwise it seems to be just too fiery) and keep in jar in the fridge.  Very hard to not just keep on eating it.

It looks delicious Lynne! Thanks for sharing the recipe and your photo.

I’m going back to the woods tomorrow to get some more… When I went today I noticed it was in full flower and the air was sweet and pungent with bluebells and garlic, what a great combination, an opportunity for an enterprising perfumist or a Heston Blumenthal icecream…..

It’s all flowering now so the season will be over soon!  Gather ye garlic while ye may…if you’re not sure what it looks like, here is my best close-up shot to help.