Egg glut

We've got an egg glut. I often have an omelette or a boiled egg with my salad for lunch, but there's a limit to how many eggs one person can eat. Hubby isn't keen on eating eggs unless they've been whisked with some sugar and flour to make a cake, so the responsibility of keeping the egg mountain in check falls mostly on my shoulders. So what's a girl to do. Well bake, of course!

I raided the freezer and found small bags of grated courgettes, so the obvious thing to make was a scrummy courgette cake. I also came across some blueberries and after leafing through my new but sadly neglected cook books I decided to make blueberry muffins a la Nigel Slater.

Blueberry muffins (makes 12)

125g plain flour

125g spelt flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1/2 tsp salt

55g butter

125g sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

100g yoghurt

220g blueberries

Preheat the oven to 190°C. Place 12 paper muffin cases in a muffin tin. Sift together the flours, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt. Cream the butter and sugar, lightly beat the eggs and add to the mixture. Add the vanilla extract, then mix in the yoghurt. Gently add the dry ingredients and continue to mix throroughly. Fold in the berries. Drop the mixture into paper cases and sprinkle with some demerara sugar and rolled oats if you happen to have some. Bake for 20-22 mins.

Beats my usual blueberry muffin recipe from Fay Ripley hands down.

Apple's the word!

We went to B&Q on the weekend and while Hubby was looking at what I call boring stuff, I sneaked to the garden bit and the trolley was filled with green leafy things in no time. I found an apple tree (Discovery) to replace our cherry tree (that got offended by very wet feet and was finished off by a well aimed shovelful of icy snow), a fig tree (Brown Turkey) and two blueberry varieties I didn't have yet (mail ordered Nui, Chandler and Herbert got new friends called Goldtraube and Northland). And I only went for some playsand for the chooks' dustbath!

It will take a few years before we get any apples (provided that the tree survives that long) and I really wanted to make some more of that delicious jam, so I placed an add on Freecycle asking for some apples and boy did we get some! We came home from this lovely lady's house with a big flexitub full of gorgeous tangy apples. You can see the bounty in the picture above. I used just over two kilos of apples to make some jam (result: the best jam so far!) and the tub still looks full. I think I'll have to find some more apple recipes sharpish!

Another thing on my to do list is to plant the apple tree. I was going to train it somehow, but I can't decide what would be the best way. The label suggests to plant it at an angle of 45°, so maybe I should follow that advice. I've never seen a tree planted this way though and I keep thinking that to everyone but a fruit tree connoisseur it might look like someone's planted the tree after a very long night in the pub! Anything to save some space, I suppose.

Anyone grown apple trees in big pots?