Cooking with the little monster - muffins

Hi everyone,

A few weeks ago I came across this recipe at an ASWC link party, I liked the idea of a quick and easy (and hopefully not too much mess) cooking activity to do with the little monster, so I made up a batch of the bulk muffin mix, and put it in an air tight container for another day.

Last week I decided to make my 1st batch of muffins with the little monsters help :)

I collected everything we needed to make the muffins...

The bulk muffin mix made from this recipe

milk, egg, oil, and chocolate bits.

Then gathered the utensils we needed, measuring cups, mixing spoon and a bowl.

Then the little monster and I mixed all the ingredients up in a bowl.

So far the process has been very clean :)

Just the type of activity I was looking for :P

I did think the mixture was a bit on the runny side,

but decided to trust the recipe rather than try to fix it somehow.

Then I decided to pour the mixture into my silicon muffin trays, all went well until I had to pick them up to put them in the oven, (and then I realised I should have used my metal ones), as mixture went EVERYWHERE!

So I put the silicon trays into some old flat pans...

I lost about 3 muffins worth of mixture in the process too :(

Who invented silicon muffin trays anyway?!

And into the oven!

Here is where I made another error :(

I put them in my oven at 170 Degrees Celsius (as my oven is fan forced) 

instead of 190 Degrees Celsius as the recipe stated 

(as I wasn't sure if "fan forced" had been taken into account).

Well this may have been the wrong decision, as I had to cook them for an extra 10min and they were still a little undercooked in the centers...

(oh, and you will notice from the picture below that the choc bits all sank to the bottom of the mixture - not sure why?)

But that didn't seem to matter to the little monster - he thought they were YUM :)

Today we made our second batch...

I fixed the backing tray issue by using a metal one, and I fixed the temperature issue and actually cooked them at the right temperature (shock horror!)

And they worked (the inside was cooked much better - in other words it wasn't half raw :P)

The only thing that I wasn't that happy with was that they didn't rise as much as I would have liked...

I wonder how I fix that for next time (I think I have about 20 batches of mixture left :P)? Any ideas lovely internet readers?  

Oh and what cooking with kids recipes are your favourites - I need more ideas as the little monster loves it :)

Emma