New Year Goodies!

I had a sudden urge today to do the first batch of baking of the year. Mainly spurred on by the amount of baking stuff left over from all the Christmas cooking plus a desire to use the food processor my mum gave me the other day (how did I live without one of those for so long?!)

So, first to be used up was some slightly(!) over-ripe bananas and some of the chocolate mountain that the kids had accumalated over the Christmas period. There's only one thing to make when you've lots of bananas, and that's Banana & Choc Chip Muffins (recipe donated by my lovely neighbour Jill!). I swear they are the easiest thing ever to whip up and they taste delicious!By now I was on a role and wanted to bake more stuff. Whilst Christmas shopping a couple of months ago, I spotted this little beauty in my local baragin book shop:
Instantly, my little cupcake queen Marie sprang to mind, so I picked one up as a little present for her. Then walked round the shop and went back to pick up another! So, I had a flick through and found a perfect recipe to try and use up some of the spice rack overflow: Spiced Apple Muffins:

The smell of them baking alone was enough to get anyone drooling!

Of course, my little crafty goddess-in-training wanted to get in on the baking frenzy, so she had a look through the book and chose to make these butterfly muffins:

We only had wholemeal self raising flour in the cupboard but thankfully this worked fine and was a healthy balance to the marshmallows and shocking pink buttercream! Emily certainly didn't have any complaints:

So, the only problem was that, 32 muffins later, we didn't have any room left in the cake box as it's still full of Christmas cake, mince pies and yule log! Thankfully, muffins freeze (I hope!) so they're now in my freezer for those 'oh, I've just popped round for a cuppa' moments. I'll get the kettle on...