Lux Aurumque

Late-afternoon light: slanting and mellow and golden.

Sweet Potato Muffins

Oh baking... I love that feeling when you throw stuff together and it tastes, somehow, good. Generally I'm the sort of person who follows recipes slavishly, but given that I had baked sweet potato bread twice with delicious results, I felt free to experiment a little bit and would up adapting that recipe to bake muffins. Now the recipe below looks insane, but that's just me blathering on. It's really simple and gets you 12 awesome muffins. What's not to like?

Ingredients

• 1 cup honey
• ½ cup vegetable oil
• 2 eggs
• 1¾ cups sifted all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 cooked and mashed sweet potato (comes to approximately  1¼ cups)
• 1 cup chopped pecans

 Directions

1. Grease your muffin tray! I always like to do this first, because otherwise I forget, and then I'm frantically greasing them at the last minute, with the batter and oven ready. 
2. First, cook the sweet potato. This will take longer than you expect, a good 30 minutes of boiling (you really don't want there to be any hard lumps of uncooked tuber left, so in this case, it's okay to overcook.) 
3. While your sweet potato is boiling, chop your pecans and set aside.
4. Combine your flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon and nutmeg in a bowl, mix it and set it aside. 
5. Combine the honey and oil. This shouldn't be too much of a problem, unless, like me, your honey has crystallized. In that case, if after much whisking your honey and oil hasn't combined, don't worry. We'll fix it in step 8. 
6. Your sweet potato should be done by now! Check to see if it's good and cooked by sticking a knife or skewer in it. If it goes in smooth, you're done! If not, stick it back in boiling water and check on it periodically. Once it's done, the skin will come off easily. Chop the sweet potato into large chunks and mash it. If you use a blender, you'll probably wind up adding a quarter cup of water, which is cool too.  Set your mashed or blended sweet potatoes off to a side.
7. This is a good time to pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees. A lot of baking recipes will tell you to pre-heat as the first step, but I'm a slow, slow cook and I inevitable wind up with my oven ready way before my batter is. You'll have a sense of how slow or fast your oven is, and of how slow or fast you are at assembling ingredients, so this step can go up or down the list depending on that. 
8. Add eggs to the honey-oil mixture and beat well. If you had a problem with the honey and oil not combining well, once you add the eggs and whisk, you should get a nice homogenous mixture. 
9. Combine the flour mixture (from step 4) with the egg-honey-oil mix. Rather than adding all the flour at once, add a bit, mix it in well, add some more until finally you've got a nice smooth batter. 
10. Add your mashed sweet potato and stir until the batter looks nice and even (no orange swirls!)
11. Add in the chopped pecans (step 3!) and stir. 
12. Using a ladle or a serving spoon, pour your batter into your greased standard 12-muffin tray. Try and even out the level of batter in each cup, otherwise some of your muffins are going to have more of a muffin top than others. 
13. Stick it in the oven for 25-30 minutes. (Use this time for clean-up.)
14. After 30 minutes, your muffins should be light brown and smell fantastic (I'm not kidding. With the cinnamon and nutmeg, your kitchen will smell like Christmas!) Take them out of the oven, and leave them to cool in the muffin tray. Once cool, you can use a butter knife to loosen the muffins from the cups and pop them out of the tray.
15. Enjoy!

Banana Bake Fest

Given that I (and the rest of my family) love bananas, we inevitably buy too many and then wind up with a bunch of really ripe, really sweet bananas. Usually, I make smoothies, but when I'm in a mood to munch, I bake banana bread. The recipe is really easy - it was the first thing I ever baked -and the end result is sweet, nutty, crunchy deliciousness.

Today I decided to try something different and made banana crumb muffins. This is my first try at baking muffins and they wound up going perfectly with my afternoon coffee. This is a quick and easy recipe, though I did make two changes: first, I used brown sugar throughout; second, I used half a cup of sugar in the muffin dough instead of three-quarters of a cup. You could probably reduce the sugar even further and still get a delicious muffin - the bananas themselves will be pretty sweet and the crunchy crumb topping is even sweeter.

Shelob Kutty

Me: AAAAAAIEEEEEEEEE!!!
Dad: What? What?
Me: *point and wibble*
Dad: Oh, please. It's probably more scared of you than you are of it.
Me: I really doubt that. It's probably the runt of the litter and Papa Spider and Mama Spider and all its one hundred siblings are probably waiting around the counter to EAT US. Have you learned nothing from Hollywood?
Dad: ...

Habib Koité & Bamada at the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation

 

Habib Koité playing in the midst of the not-so-few, the brave, the energetic - 
the people who got up and danced.

Heroic Pose, Crappy Photo

Towards the beginning of the two-hour set; 

the drummer - Souleymane Ann, I think! - also played the Calabash.

On the Talking Drum, Mahamadou Kone with Bassist Abdoul Wahab Berthé.

The Guitarist - Le Professeur Boubacar Sidibé! - and the Balaphonist - name unknown, sorry.
(ETA: The Balaphonist is Fassery Diabaté; thank you, anonymous tipster!)

The Bassist had this perpetually khadoos expression on his face. Why?

Koite kept the audience laughing with banter between songs, but he did make the serious point that he wants young Africans to dream of Africa - not the USA, not Europe but Africa. 

Like the song says, "L'Afrique fera son chemin..."

Habib Koite and Bamada - if you get a chance to see them, don't miss out.

They're playing Toronto the 25th of March as part of a North American tour, so definitely pencil that in.

In Your Direction / From The Satellite Mind

Merry Christmas!

To you and yours, my very best wishes during this festive season.

Reindeer on Standby...

Now Playing: Metric - Gold Guns Girls

Fifteen Seconds

Now Playing: Cocteau Twins - Alice



I've always loved long-exposure night shots. Fifteen seconds is a bit much, but the end result is just so shiny, I can't help myself!

Little Drummer Boy

at Jaisalmer Fort, Rajasthan

Per un pugno di fiori

Bleeding Hearts, Then & Now

"No, seriously, I haven't been drinking. Why do you ask?"

"I shall call it... Bluegrass."

Penny for its thoughts

"Damn Paparrazzi."

Bye Bye Birdie

Now Playing: Justin Timberlake - What Goes Around

So spring has sprung, and the birds just won't bloody shut up about it -

Fire in the Sky

Now Playing: Gabin - Une histoire d'amoire

Winter Fingers

Now Playing: Laidback - Beautiful Day

Don't drink the water

Now Playing: Keane - Atlantic

"What? I can't take a quick dip to escape the Mediterranean heat?"

A-hiking we went (and now my feet hurt)

My Dad and I went hiking Sunday afternoon, starting out at Edwards Gardens (at Leslie and Lawrence) and finishing at St Clair Station: here's some of what we saw en route.