Easy on the go breakfast cups

The quest for acceptable holiday breakfasts continues.  I've tried a few online recipes, and found many that are suitable, but the kids either get bored or find some issue with the results quite quickly.  I don't want to compromise, and I want a handful of solutions that I can put on rotation.  After a lot of trial and error, I came up with this iteration which is a mix of a couple of different recipes.

1 and a half cups of oats

2-3 tbsp of ground flax seed or similar (I used Aldi's ground linseed with raspberry and blueberry powder)

3 small brown bananas

3 tbsp smooth peanut butter (I used Whole Earth)

2tbsp coconut oil

half a cup of dark chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 180°C and lightly oil 10-12 silicon muffin cases.

Mash the bananas as smoothly as you can in a small bowl.  Add the peanut butter and mix until well blended.  Now add the coconut oil.  If you've used a peanut butter that is even more natural and separated, you may not need as much or any coconut oil.

In a bigger bowl, mix the oats and the flax seed.  You could add some chia as well if you like.

Stir through the choc chips.

Add the banana peanut butter mix and combine well.  Divide between muffin cups and bake for 15 mins.

Remove when done, they should be browned and slightly crisp around the edges.  Allow to cool for a few mins and then turn carefully onto a cooling rack.  Store in an airtight container.

Serve with berries if liked.

Using up biscuit type cereal and using up bananas too

Well, it has been a while, because I or Godpapa have been doing almost all the cooking from Slimming World recipes, and so far, since March I have managed to lose 11.5 lbs, and so I'm extremely happy, and hardly ever hungry. I'm not going to explain the SW ethos or method, it is easy enough to sign up online or join your local club!

However, I do crave a little something sweet from time to time, and obviously home made is far better as you know what's gone into it, and I've even been known to sit and CALCULATE the Syn value of every ingredient in a cake, add them up, then divide that by how ever many portions we've served and usually it's a perfectly decent number. On the SW plan you are encouraged to have between 5 and 15 Syns a day, and that makes it much easier to not feel deprived!

Anyway,  thanks to my Dad, we recently discovered a super new gluten free biscuit cereal  - Nutribrex -  and I really enjoy it, however, it isn't on the list of "allowed" breakfasts, tho each biscuit is only 3 Syns, so I sometimes have one as an included treat snack just before bed-time.

Today I had some bananas which everyone was refusing to eat, and I stumbled upon this lovely recipe from the Australian blog The Organised Housewife, so it seemed like a super plan.

I suddenly remembered that Australian cup measurements and tablespoons are different from American and UK ones, (US cups are based on the imperial 8oz cup volume, and the Aussie cup is based on the metric 250ml volume.) If you want exact conversions, feel free to google it and weigh the flour out, but I just used my American cups and heaped them a little!

Now, the beauty of this recipe is that it can be converted so many ways!

Using the Nutribrex, and if you use Doves Farm (or any other) gluten free flour, you can make this a gluten free treat very easily. Using Pure and a non-dairy milk you can make this dairy free. Using actual Weetabix (or shops own variation) and sweetener, and low fat spread, you can easily make this a very low Syn treat (if  using the biscuit cereal as your HEb) Anyway, however you make it, MAKE IT, it is easy, delicious and fun for the kids to help with too.

You will need:

3 bananas (over ripe and mushy is perfect) mashed up

4 Weetabix style biscuit cereal bix.

3/4 -1 cup of milk

80g butter/margarine/low fat spread

2 eggs

1.5 cups self-raising flour

2 tbs brown sugar

a handful of choc chips (obviously we used white choc, the original recipe calls for milk choc)

I would have added cinnamon but Big'Un says she no longer likes cinnamon. I'm glad I didn't tho.

Heat up the oven to 180-200 degrees. You know your oven.

Line a 12 hole muffin tin with muffin papers.

Get the kids to crush up the cereal biscuits in a medium sized bowl. They will LOVE this. Or do it yourself and get some anxiety out!

Add the bananas, and then the milk. Mix well and leave to stand for 10 minutes.

In a LARGE bowl, beat together the butter/marg with the eggs. Don't worry if this is a weird texture like you sometimes see in the clouds on summer evenings, it will work.

Add the banana mixture, and fold it through. Add the flour, sugar and then the choc chips and mix until just combined, and spoon the mixture into the prepared muffin cups.

Bake until golden and a skewer comes out clean, about 20-30 minutes depending on the size of the muffins. We found it actually made 12 cakes, we never get the amount stated in the recipe, but this was SPOT on.

Really tasty, and a lovely texture.  And I wouldn't have a problem serving them for brekkie really either!

Banana Oaty Buttermilk Muffins

I had a couple of bananas going black as usual, as it has been half term and so Tiny isn't having them routinely in the morning before the dog walk.  I also had a litre of Polish buttermilk in the fridge, which I love to buy as it is only £1 and lasts well and is great for waffles, scones, American "biscuits", lassi, and muffins.  Since we were doing a half term playgroup, I decided to throw together a nice healthy and filling muffin recipe to help blood sugar levels stay, well, um, level... So I found a recipe online, and tweaked it to fit my wishes and had these ready in no time! In fact, because I made mini muffins, the thing that took the longest was the spooning of a teaspoon of mixture at a time into tiny muffin tins, the making of the batter took no more than 10 minutes, including finding and measuring all the ingredients.

1 cup plain flour

1 cup wholemeal flour

1/2 cup caster sugar (I used a bit less and it was fine)

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp bicarb of soda

1/3 cup normal porridge oats (we use Flahavans Organic, but bog standard Basics etc would be absolutely fine.)

2 tbs oat bran (optional)

The above are the dry ingredients.

1 cup buttermilk

1 cup well mashed banana. (I had 2 medium bananas, and I also mushed up a peeled pear which was likely to be ignored as it was bruised, but was perfect for smoothie-fying or similar)

2 tbs veg oil

1 egg

These are the wet ingredients.

First, heat the oven to 190 degrees C. Prepare the muffin tin/silicon either with a cooking spray or with muffin papers.

Stir  all the dry ingredients into a large bowl.

In a separate jug or bowl, whisk the wet ingredients well together.

Pour the wet over the dry, and stir quickly just until the mix is blended.  Do not overmix, do not beat or cream or whip like you would a cake mix; be gentle, and be very lax.

Spoon the mixture into the muffin cups, about 3/4 full.  With mini muffins this can be slow, about a teaspoon at a time, and you will need 2 trays.

Bake 10-15 mins for mini muffins and 15-20 for normal muffins, until a cocktail stick comes out clean when stabbed into the centre.

Cool in tins for 15 mins, then remove and cool completely on a rack.

Needless to say these are best within 24 hours.

breakfast bite flapjack morsels

Another end of cereal packet recipe.

You may recall I pour the dregs and crumbs and powder of a pack of breakfast cereal, be it muesli, granola or branflakes, into a medium lock and lock and store until I can use it.

I often bake a little something on a Thursday evening for the Friday morning playgroup I host, but as Littl'Un had no school, we had a little extra time on Friday morning itself, so I threw these together and ate my brekkie while they baked. Mixing took no more than 5 minutes.

I poured about half the amount I had collected, I'd say about 4-6 ounces, into a bowl, added a large squirt of liquid marg, a glug of squeezy golden syrup, a tablespoon or 2 of sugar (depending on the cereal dregs in use) and about a 100ml boiling or warm water. 

I then stirred this all together until it was clumping and sticking together. 

Then I lightly oiled the cups of my lovely silicon mini muffin tray (which was a Christmas pressie from Papa) and gently pressed a teaspoonful of the mix into each.

I then baked this for 15 mins at 180 deg C.

I then left it to cool a little in the tray before popping the little bites out of the cups and leaving them to cool completely.  These are chewy, crumbly, crunchy and very economical to make! Yours will be unique, relying upon your own cereal library input.  Each batch will even differ.  Have fun experimenting!

Thermos overnight porridge

So I've been following and feeling inspired by the wonderful Girl Called Jack blog lately. She's done a few posts about porridge and other oat based breakfasts. Big'Un has been using her Berry Bircher (Starbucks-alike) pot recipe for a few months for her early morning starts. She makes enough for 2 days at a time in the evening and it is all soaked, creamy and plumptious by the morning. 

Papa has a couple of 5am starts a week, and he has been taking those "just add boiling water" instant porridge pots, but the cost of those quickly adds up, even if we buy them on offer! 

I looked into slow cooker porridge but it seemed to be very fraught, so I carried on searching. Then I saw a couple of very interesting posts from the lovely Jack about instant porridge and so we decided to give her method involving milk powder and oats and the kettle a go. However this seemed very heavy when made with ordinary oats, (and I didn't want to use more processed quick oats) and Papa felt very uncomfy after this. We also tried the microwave version but it also wasn't quite right. I looked again at more slow cooker methods, and even found there are multicooker machines which will cook porridge on a timer, ready for the morning. Yes, I know both hob top or microwave porridge don't take long to make, but they do take a while to cool down, and that is a problem unless we start getting up yet another half hour earlier.

Eventually, I found a few posts discussing thermos cooking. I was intrigued. I gave it a go.

Wow I'm so glad I did!!  Here's how:

So first we made the Girl Called Jack oat/milk powder mix and stored it in a cereal container. Papa had added ground ginger and lemon sugar to flavour his. 

I then boiled a kettle and preheated a proper metal thermos flask. Then I refilled the kettle and boiled it again. Once the kettle came to the boil again, I emptied the flask out (into the washing up bowl, so as not to waste it) and using a jam funnel, I put in one mugful of the oats mixture. I then quickly added 3 mugsful of the fresh boiling water. I sealed up the flask, shook it around, and then left it on its side overnight.

The next morning we had gorgeously creamy, smooth, cooked, warm porridge!! The perfect consistency and the perfect temperature. There was at least enough there for 4 people, in a 1.5 ltr flask. We had to mix it up as there was thin liquid on top and stodgy lumps at the bottom, but it evened out. That was a huge food flask, so I'm trying it again with a standard 1ltr drinks thermos. I will report back on how it works out. 

Seriously, try it! You will love it!! You could try adding cocoa to the mix for a change, the flavours you could add are endless.