Sweet Potato, Butternut Squash, Apple and Sage Muffins Recipe

My mother's day was spent playing scrabble and baking with my beautiful momma. For my mums birthday I bought her the Lorraine Pascale's 'A Lighter Way To Bake' which is packed with a load of lovely recipes which aren't too naughty for you - the brownies are like 50 Kcals less than the average recipe. Personally I didn't like the sound of these muffins and was very dubious about trying them however I actually really enjoyed them and they are only 155 Kcals!

What you will need:
- 12 Hole muffin tin
- Muffin cases
- 200g ready-prepared sweet potato and butternut squash mix, chopped finely
- 300g wholemeal flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 2 eggs (1 egg and 2 egg whites)
- 250ml semi-skimmed milk
- 100g low fat natural yoghurt
- 50ml sunflower oil
- 1 tbsp maple syrup
- 3 tsp finely chopped sage leaves (we actually didn't us sage in ours as we didn't have any)
- Pinch of salt
- 1 eating apple - peeled cored and roughly grated

Method:
- Pre heat the oven to 200'C, Fan 180'C, Gas Mark 6. Line the muffin tin with 12 paper cases
- Steam the sweet potato and butternut squash for 5 minutes until tender
- In  large bowl, mix the flour, bicarbonate of soda and baking powder
- Beat the egg and egg whites in a large jug
- Beat the milk, yoghurt, oil and maple syrup until smooth and well combined and add the egg mix
- Mix the wet mixture into the dry mixture with as few stirs as possible
- Add the butternut squash and sweet potato along with the sage and salt and fold in
- Spread the mixture between the 12 cases
- Scatter the grated apple over the cases

Pop in the oven for 20-25 minutes. The centre may be damp from the moisture of the vegetables but the cakey part shouldn't look raw.

Send me your links if you have baked the same recipe, I want to know your thoughts! I really enjoyed them!

My brother sent me this while away at uni of my mum with her Lauren Pascale Carrot and Apple Cake, the cutie hahaha!

Thanks for putting up with me and being the best friend and mum I could ask for. Love you forever mumsy!

Recipe from Lorraine Pascale 'A Lighter Way to Bake'

Baking Mad #3 GIVEAWAY

We finally have our Cookbook to giveaway, excited? We are!

So because this is for a cook book, the obvious route was to do another baking post, yay! This time we went for something which we thought was a bit different, bread.
We actually expected this to be a lot harder than it was, and were surprised that we didn't need much ingredients at all to make great tasty bread. We follwed this repcipe on bakingmad.com

This bread was amazing, even though it was just plain white bread, it tasted so good especially with Heinz mediterranean vegetable soup! David also made his own Hairy Bikers Beer and Cheese Bread which was just as good especially toasted!
I definitely would recommend using the Bakingmad.com website as it so easy to use and there is so many differenet recipes for you to use and browse through. There is also great ideas and inspiration if you're bored or just ran out of imagination. Also definitely check out The Pink Whisk, Ruth Clemens's blog, as we are giving away her Cake decorating book, which is amazing! It has some great tips, templates, ideas, and pictures, there is even a motivational ending on cake decorating!
I think our next baking challenge will definitely be either Chelsea Buns or Scones, because who doesn't love homemade scones! 

Also guys, what do you think of our new layout?!

Don't forget to enter in the competition and leave a comment of your favourite Bakingmad.com recipe!

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Bakingmad.com #2

Hello Lovelies!

Happy Easter, hope you're all eating as much chocolate as you can. I've got my Easter egg waiting for me to demolish.

We have some exciting news, our FIRST GIVEAWAY will soon be published to win a Baking Mad Cook Book for all you food and baking fanatics! We haven't received the Cook Book yet, so as soon as we do we'll post more information about the competition, hopefully will be next week!

Anyway in the spirit of Easter, we've been doing a lot of Easter baking! First of all me and Tori made some cute cupcakes, cornflake cakes and shortbreads which all turned out fabulous check out the post here. Then bakingmad.com sent me some decoration ingredients to use so me (Charlotte) and David have baked possibly the most extravagant Victoria sponge I've ever made.

Be sure to check out bakingmad.com if you've not already as they have so many amazing easy recipes for you to follow like these Cake Pops, each recipe have a step by step guide of how to make it and they have loads of inspirational ideas to make your cooking better and more fun!

This is what we got sent. I've never used roll on icing before, so it was a challenge when we finally started decorating the cake.

We decided on a Victoria Sponge with a jam centre, following this recipe but changing the additional ingredients

Here's how to make a brilliant Victoria Sponge

As this was the first time that either me or David had used Roll on Icing I'm afraid I can't give you any advice or tips to perfecting it as we just improvised on our cake, all I can say is that you need a lot of patiences. Check out bakingmad.com here for more information on how to dye the icing.

Here it is! This took us all day long and after lots of stressing trying to get my chick and eggs to look life like, I was very pleased of the final outcome!
Massive thanks to David for helping me, and doing all the banner and the icing letters and for the morale boost!
After trying the cake, it was totally worth it, the Sponge tastes amazing and the icing is just the right amount, I wish I could give you all a piece to try.

We will let you know as soon as we get the competition sort and hopefully you will be a lucky winner of a new Cook Book!

Have you made an Easter Cake? What do you think of our cake?

Don't forget to add us on Blog Lovin' here and add us in your circle on Google+ on the right side bar

Bakingmad.com #1

Evening!
Hope your all enjoying Easter, we thought that we'd carry on with our Easter theme. Like Charlotte said in Bakingmad #2 post we did some baking together before we was given the Bakingmad set and it's too good not too post cause they all turned out so tasty.

The recipe we picked could have been anything from Cupcakes, Flapjacks or even something Easter related like Easter Bunny Cake Pops. There was just too much choice and we decided to make 3 things; Homemade Shortbread, Chocolate Corflake Cakes and Easter Cupcakes
And they all turned out pretty good!

Round 1: Easter Cupcakes

The finished product of all our cakes is at the bottom of this post :) 

Round 2: Home Made Short Bread

The finished product of all our cakes is at the bottom of this post :) 

Round 3: Cornflake Cakes

We couldn't find a proper Cornflake Cake Recipe on bakingmad.com however they do have Chocolate Crispy Cakes which is practically the same, just with different cereal and we've made ours Easter related too!

Well we had TONES of fun making all these treats, had a proper full afternoon of baking and finished the day off eating them while having a Harry Potter marathon! Bliss.

As we've said, we are still waiting on a Bakingmad Cook Book to arrive for us to give away, and as soon as we get it I'm sure we'll get our hands messy, bake some more and tell you more about the giveaway!