Happy Mistakes

I'm currently on my holidays and so, it seems, are my brain cells. There is always a natural wind-down in the first week of a holiday, when you realise how tired you are, so you sleep alot, eat and drink nice things then come alive a bit in Week 2. Worryingly, I've done the opposite. I was positively buzzing at the start of Week 1 and managed to read three books in two days. Since then, I've been slogging through the fourth book, even though it's actually a very easy read - not too taxing, good characters and a plot that races along nicely (the perfect holiday book). More worrying still, I can't seem to get any of the answers in our daily beach crossword (it's all happening here folks) and - worst of all - I'm making really silly grammatical mistakes. I've been saying things like 'it was wrote', 'warm it is' and 'she rided the bike', and just generally stumbling my way through sentences like a foreigner speaking English for the first time.  

Now you may have gathered from previous posts that I love language and all its intricacies - I read books on word origins, meanings and linguistics just for fun - so for me to start spouting sentences with glaringly poor grammar is akin to walking along a crowded path in Dublin while wind-milling my arms and shouting at passers-by. It is both horrifying (what on earth is happening to me?) and embarrassing (I wince when anyone else uses bad grammar and this is infinitely worse, as I know better). My youngest sister, who is on hols with me, is greatly amused by my grammatical slip-ups - she reckons I never get anything wrong (absolutely not true) and sees this as a breath of fresh air. Perhaps this is a form of Tourette's Syndrome, only instead of cursing or twitching, I use the wrong past-participle? Hopefully, it's simply the result of extreme tiredness and will pass before I head home. If it continues to worsen, this may well be the last comprehensible blog post that I write (if indeed you can understand my ramblings at all). 

In the meantime, I shall leave you with a wonderful recipe for muffins - originally by Hugh Fearnsley-Whittingstall and improved through happy circumstance. The use of lemon zest, lemon curd and ground almonds in these muffins seems fitting, given that I am, at present, ensconced in sunny southern Spain. Both lemons and almonds abound here and are used in both savoury and sweet dishes alike. I first made these little treasures a couple of months ago and haven't yet gotten round to sharing them with you. They are about half the size of the typical shop / cafe muffin, which means that they are a guilt-free pleasure or indeed that you could happily eat two of them (baker's choice). The use of ground almonds helps them to stay lovely and moist - a bonus with muffins as generally they're best eaten on the day you make them (home-made muffins contain less fat proportionally than other cakes and so stale more quickly). 

The original recipe called for the lemon curd to be swirled through the batter in the bowl, but being lazy that day I just dropped a blob into each filled muffin case and popped the tray in the oven. This led to an unforeseen volcano-effect, with the lemon curd bubbling up and spilling over slightly onto the tray (oh dear, I thought, when I saw what had happened). But the butter and sugar in the lemon curd caramelised and formed a crust on top of each muffin, which was such a fantastic bonus that it more than made up for the sticky mess on the tray (nothing a sink full of hot sudsy water couldn't tackle anyhow). The lemon curd beneath the sticky crust remains like the liquid gold it is; a melting, creamy, zingy contrast to the sweetness of the light almond sponge. These are an altogether wonderful addition to my catalogue of muffin recipes and in the event that I continue my slow but steady decline into Jelly Brain, with grammatical errors at every turn, I can console myself with the fact that not all mistakes are unfortunate; some are very happy indeed.
Caramelised Lemon Curd & Almond Muffins
Ingredients
125g plain flour
125g ground almonds
2 tsp baking powder
100g caster sugar
1 egg
125g plain yoghurt
125ml whole milk
75g melted (salted) butter
150g lemon curd

Method
Place 12 paper cases in a muffin tray and preheat the oven to 180C.
Put the dry ingredients in a bowl and whisk lightly to aerate and combine. Mix the egg, yoghurt, milk and melted butter together in a jug. Pour them into the dry ingredients and mix lightly, stopping as soon as everything is combined (if you beat the batter too much, i.e. over-mix it, the result will be dense, cakey muffins). Spoon the mixture into the muffin cases to three-quarters fill them and then add a blob of lemon curd in each one. Bake for about 30 mins or until golden brown, transfer to a wire rack to cool a bit and eat while still warm (just as good cold though, if you get distracted and forget to eat them... as if!).