Making Muffins

I have always loved cooking. When I was a child it would be my weekend must, after school, during the holidays. My sister, brother and I had our own cook books and we would see the marvellous pictures of chocolate cakes and fairy-iced cupcakes. Biscuits, bread, brownies, pastry cheese sticks. Recently it has been a dream rather than a reality. I tried it a few times. The simple cake recipe my Mum used would be so easy. 4,4,2,4. What are you thinking?...'What?' or 'Yes!' 4oz sugar, 4oz baking marg, 2 eggs, 4oz flour. Sounds easy enough. What a shock I had when I tried to put the ingredients in a bowl and mix them together. My arms (and heart) had not had such a work out for months, years even; and I felt it for days afterwards. This was when I made the decision to use a food processor. It worked a few times, my husband didn't complain. They were kind of flat as the mixture had been battered to death and the self-raising part of the flour just decided to extinguish itself in the processor rather than the oven.
So what then? Muffins. Easier, two lots of ingredients-Wet and Dry. The Dry and Wet could even be prepared separately and combined another time. Three sessions in the kitchen instead of one. Getting better. But a lot of ingredients (in and out of cupboards, as I described in 'eggs and dishwashers', isn't quite my forte) and still a tough mix. So I have actually given it a rest for about 6 months. An occasional attempt, as I just couldn't resist, though I still wanted to achieve it without the pain and with a decent result. The solution has been a food mixer rather than a processor. It is my new best friend. To have a dough hook and a mixing hook and a whisk, with different speed settings is brilliant. Again, I can prepare the ingredients at different times with the muffins and mix them together, or rather instruct the mixer to mix them together! I hope to make them once a week- they are perfect for the lunch box my husband takes to work, and an ideal add-on for an evening meal as he always eats more than I do (well, he is 6'2"!).
This week's were quite exotic. We had a few single snack boxes, delivered as an offer through the post- you may have had them, Graze is the company. This week one of the boxes contained orange soaked sultanas, dried cranberries and dried apples. I snipped up the pieces of apple with a pair of scissors into the mixer and threw the sultanas and cranberries in too. As a hindsight option I would probably recommend adding ground cinnamon and nutmeg or a five spice mix, but not bad for a recovering ME cook!