Of famished food bloggers and muffins

Now, this will make you laugh:  yesterday was a busy day with one thing and another - so busy in fact that in the afternoon I started to feel sick.  What happened?  It turns out that I had forgotten to eat!  How silly is that - a food blogger who forgets to feed herself? :-)  It did make me laugh (once I felt a bit better).  I think it was because I spent most of the morning in the kitchen, preparing food, having little tastes here and there and I just didn't feel hungry when it came to mealtime.  I won't let that happen again!

One of the reasons I was busy was that I was making a batch of muffins for our local community centre.  I think you will like these too - they have been inspired by the German cake "Donauwelle" ( = waves of the river Danube) which is normally baked as a tray bake.  It's a lovely mixture of marble cake, cherries, cream or cream patisserie (basically custard) and chocolate.

I needed the cakes to be portable and easy to eat, so I chose to make muffins and instead of a thick layer of whipped cream, I dug a little well into the muffin and filled it with creme patisserie.  A cherry on top, a light sprinkling of melted chocolate and a dusting of icing sugar...job done!

I'd probably call these "Black Forest Muffins" as they remind me of a Black Forest cake - what do you think?

You've gotta roll with it...

Yesterday, I forgot to buy eggs.  That made for a very Un-Happy Larder as it meant that I couldn't really do any baking or at least not what I had been planning to do.  But sometimes you just have to roll with it, don't you?  There were plenty of other things I could do and the eggs could wait.

Fast forward to later in the day and the Happy Larder was back to being cheerful again - the egg situation had been resolved and I could get on with making my cake: a Swiss Roll filled with strawberry jam and a bit of cream.  I had attempted this once before and it turned out horrible - it broke apart and the sponge was rock-solid.  Well, I found out later that my baking powder had been out of date...no wonder then!  See, things do go wrong at the Happy Larder...it's just that I prefer writing about the good stuff :-)  And good it was because this attempt worked out fine - I made a little photo guide... I hope you like it!  It was done using a website called Picmonkey that lets you do photo collages for free.

So, here we are: a super-easy but lovely cake to impress your family with.  It is so versatile as well - you can vary the filling pretty much according to what you have to hand.  How about adding cocoa powder to the sponge and filling the roll with cherries?  Or using apple lemon curd as per my post a while ago?  You can have it with or without the cream and have the whole thing done within 30 minutes... now, that's what I call an easy recipe! :-)