Fudge, Apple & Pecan Muffins

Look! I'm here! Writing a recipe post within a respectable space of time since my cop-out post last week! How can this be?! Maybe I've taken time out of my busy working life in order to write to you, dear reader.
...or I'm still unemployed and even more bored than ever because everyone I know has gone back to university or started a new job or flown all the way to the other side of the planet.
Yep, baking is my only friend.
I made these muffins in a crazy "I NEED TO BAKE" whirlwind, in which I decided I would use whatever was in the house to whip something up. And then I went to the shop because I decided on this recipe and there were no fudge pieces just lying around the house.
Weird, I know.

Ingredients:

- 2 free range eggs, lightly beaten

- 80g caster sugar

- 240ml milk

- 100g butter

- 300g plain flour

- 2 tsp baking powder

- half a tsp salt

- half a tsp cinnamon

- 2 eating apples

- 100g of shop-bought fudge pieces

- 100g of pecans, plus extra for decoration

- Preheat the oven to 190C/380F/Gas 5 and line a 12-hole muffin tin with paper cases.

- Melt the butter in a saucepan.

- Mix the eggs, sugar, melted butter and milk.

- Sift in the flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. Fold into the mixture.

- Peel, core and chop the apples into small chunks.

- Chop the pecans into rough-size chunks. Leave 12 unchopped for later.

- Add the pecans, apple and a handful of the fudge pieces to the muffin mixture and stir in.

- Fill each muffin case a third full with the mixture.

- Take the remaining fudge pieces and sprinkle a few on top of each of the third-filled cases.

 - With the leftover mixture, fill each case to two-thirds full. Top each uncooked muffin with one of your leftover pecans.
- Bake for 30-35 mins until well-risen and golden. Transfer to a wire rack.

One of my favourite things that I've concocted and suitably autumnal for my first September recipe. Bake them, they'll make you happy inside. 

Can I offer you some excuses?

It's been so long!

It's been so so sooo long. And that's my fault and I'm very sorry. My reasonings range from "I couldn't be bothered" right up to "I was attending a five-day horror film festival so didn't have my laptop".

Yeah.

So this isn't going to have a recipe in it as such. I have a couple of things that I've done and I need to make up my mind about what I post here...BUT! In the meantime, here are some things that I made but didn't take pictures of along the way. 

Normal blogging will resume soon, I promise.

 So these beauties were made for a job interview! At a cake shop! They asked me to make a couple of bits so I made these Peppermint Chocolate Cupcakes and my Norwegian Apple Cake. The cakes themselves were just flavoured with cocoa. I made normal buttercream icing and split it in two. One half was flavoured with peppermint extract and dyed green, and the other I added cocoa powder to. I spooned each flavour vertically into my icing syringe and then iced them! Oh, and I made peppermint creams. By hand.
I didn't get that job, but the cupcakes were lovely!

I made these as a snack for a girly weekend away in Taunton. It's just flapjack really, but I used the recipe from a Katie Morag book that we had when we were kids. Here's the recipe.

In other news, my friend Morgan packed her little suitcase and flew to bloomin' China for the year. She threw another girly-weekend-type party so I made this! For the cake I used a Victoria sponge mixture in an oven-proof bowl. The icing idea came from various books/internet sources.

Aaaand finally, there might be another reason why I haven't been blogging. My favourite programme, The Great British Bake Off has started again. It's awesome. And the week before last they had their bread episode, in which the technical bake was an 8-strand plait loaf of bread. I haven't made bread in a long long time but was inspired and so the next morning I made this, slightly-dodgy but pretty-tasty 8-strand plait loaf. Paul Hollywood, eat your heart out.

I'm completely smitten with bread making at the minute so, be warned, there could be an awful lot of dough-porn hitting your screens...