Rainy, cool days are the kind of days that draw me into the kitchen. The fact that this is a long weekend (a very Happy Un-Birthday to you Your Majesty) means there’s more time for baking and trying new recipes. This week’s #sundaybakingsunday involves a winning combination – raspberry and coconut.

I have a small collection of cookbooks that I thumb through for inspiration, and cook from regularly – including Donna Hay, Jamie Oliver, and Matt Preston (as well as a few strategically placed stacks of food magazines). I have to confess the bulky blue Women’s Weekly tome ‘Kitchen’ hasn’t been pulled off the shelf that much lately, or ever. It’s arranged by cooking equipment rather than the usual format of savoury and sweet dishes sectioned into chapters on pork, fish, chicken, soups, puddings and so on.

Flicking almost to the back of the book, I found the chapter I was after – ‘The Muffin Pan & The Patty Pan’ – ahh my comfort zone. Those of you who have embraced #sundaybakingsunday know that I love to whip up a batch of muffins. I do. They’re easy, always tasty and no fuss. They can be sweet or savoury and they don’t take long. That’s my kind of baking. There are fancier cooks out there; they won’t find any competition here.

So I found a raspberry and coconut muffin recipe, and a banana and blueberry patty cakes recipe and I thought, hang the expense, I’ll mash the processes (not the flavours) together and see what happens. (I couldn’t be bothered with rubbing butter and flour. There, I said it!)

Well that would have been fine if I’d actually read the recipes carefully and followed either of the processes correctly!

Avant-garde baking – it’s a thing!

I should have melted 125 grams of butter and half a cup of milk, instead I combined the butter and ¾ cup of caster sugar on the stove, and by the time the butter melted, the sugar hadn’t really dissolved.

I used my trusty hand mixer to get 2 eggs thick and creamy.

I combined the butter, sugar and eggs into a bigger mixing bowl, added about ½ cup desiccated coconut and ½ cup of coconut milk (left over from making butter chicken earlier in the week) and sifted in 1 ½ cups of self raising flour.

Clatter in a cup of frozen raspberries, mix, mix and I was good to go.

Filled up my baking tray with even-ish blobs of delicious cake mix, trying to be sure the berries were evenly distributed, and then into the oven at about 200 Celsius for 25 minutes.

My muffin tray is eminently reliable as a non-stick baking tray, but today, not so much! Disaster!

Not really, but even though I sprayed the tin, the bottoms of my little berry coconut cakes didn’t want to come out nicely.

 

The cakes were super light and DELICIOUS, which I think was helped by getting the eggs nice and fluffy, so I’m still counting this bake as a success. Next time I’ll try and stick with one recipe – ahh, who am I kidding, I’m a bit of a culinary winger. I like to throw in a dash more of this, switch out an ingredient for something I’ve got on hand, and make a little disguise-the-ripped-cake-bottom sauce with jam, I cook outside the lines.

 

That’s the beauty of home cooking, it is just that – cooking for the people at home, the people who I hope will accept, enjoy and perhaps even compliment a deliciously light cake, whether it is entirely intact or not.

Happy baking my friends! Let me know what you come up with this weekend, whether it is royally ‘themed’ or not.

You can leave a comment, or better still, do that and share a photo of your kitchen triumph on Instagram or my Facebook page, and don’t forget the #sundaybakingsunday tag.

 

Annette