mutteringhousewife

If you live in Sydney, you’ll know it as the day you cursed the fact that you’d washed and put away your winter jumpers.  Shortly I’m going to have three wet, cold and hungry kids here for whom a plate of crudites is just not going to cut it.  The Horror will be coming home from camp, so will in addition be hysterically tired.  What these kids need is Maple Syrup Cakes.

This is another Donna Hay recipe, and at the risk of this becoming a baking and pet peeves blog, her cookbooks really annoy me.  The recipes are terrific, don’t get me wrong.  I just can’t stand the whole matchy matchy blue thing, or the random words drifting across pages.  She seems like the kind of person who’d have those cursive wooden block letters spelling out delicious in her kitchen.  I have been tempted to buy a set of these blocks so I can spell out testicles across my kitchen windowsill, but it seems like too much effort.

I get the feeling this recipe has been translated from another set of measurements, as there are a few fractions involved.  I have discovered that rounding makes little difference, so here you go.

Cream together 90 grams of butter with two thirds of a cup of brown sugar and two tablespoons of caster sugar.  I’ll have to try without the caster sugar, I can’t believe it would make too much difference.  Also, butter at the temperature my kitchen is at isn’t going to cream, so put it in a metal bowl and sit it in the oven at 50 degrees for a bit.  Add 2 eggs, one at a time.  Add 2 tablespoons of milk, half a cup of maple syrup, one and two thirds of a cup of plain flour and two teaspoons of baking powder and mix until blended.  If, like me, you can’t be bothered washing up a muffin tin, put cupcake papers in the twelve holes and divide the mixture between them.  Bake at 180 degrees for about twenty minutes.

These cakes keep fairly well, as if they’re going to last more than the afternoon.  Time to find my woolly hat.