Berry nice!

Here at Your Vintage Life we do love a cake! Not just eating them off beautiful cake stands…we also like to bake them in our vintage kitchen!

Today we made berry muffins with our little boy, Herbie. They were a great success so I’ll take you through the recipe (and share some of our vintage kitchen treasures).

First job was to get our vintage pinnies on! This is mummy’s pinny but Herbie wanted to wear it. We, of course, washed our hands!!

Then we went down the garden to pick some juicy autumn raspberries from our fruit bed.

Next, we stopped off at the “ladies”; our 6 chickens to see if they had laid  any eggs today. Thankfully they had and we carefully brought them back to the house and into the china chicken.

We checked we had all the rest of the ingredients:

• 2 cups self raising flour
• 1 cup plain flour
• 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 3/4 cup vegetable oil

Check!

So, lets start mixing.

We use a 1950s Tala measuring cone and a Green’s grip stand mixing bowl.

The cone measures everything out in cup sizes…how it used to be done before grammes and kilos! This is so much easier….except when the recipe asks for grammes and I get a little stuck. So…I revert back to the retro 70s Salter orange scales that hang on the wall.

Little hands did the pouring and the mixing. He spent most of the time eating the raw ingredients: “I love flour mummy!”

I then remembered some blackberries left over from foraging that were in the freezer. I picked these in a park at the back of the village hall having visited an antiques fair there!

Bicarbonate of soda was added using our 1960s measuring spoons! The dry mixture was given a good stir and then we moved onto the wet ingredients. Mix in the eggs, the oil and milk and then we are ready for the fruit. At this point Herbie wanted to eat the berries. “I love blackberries mummy!” was shouted as little fingers kept picking them out of the bowl.

We poured the mixture into the muffin cases and went to make the topping.

This is a mixture of 1/4 cup of sugar, 1/4 cup of plain flour and 40g of butter (measured in the Salter scales). Finally we added berries to the top. We made 15 muffins in total.

We set the Smiths kitchen timer (also orange!) for 20 minutes and wished the cakes “Good Luck” before they went into the oven (200 degrees) to rise.

Last job….of course is to eat them with a lovely cup of tea! Here, served on pretty pink Royal Winton china! We have a lovely 1 tier cake stand, small tea pot and a great tennis set. This is a plate with a space for a tea cup…tea and cake in the same hand…how very useful!

Berry nice!