Courgette and Lime Muffins

with added peach - a variation for AlphaBakes.

We came back from a few days in Normandy to find the garden running riot in the unexpected warmth of a late summer. I don't mind excess runner beans, as they can be frozen, but courgettes which are almost marrow-sized need a bit of lateral thinking to use them up. Time for courgettes in a bake, I thought - something I've been meaning to try for ages.

After searching around, and realising that nearly all the recipes were just variations of carrot cake - with similar additions and flavourings - I settled on this recipe, from goodtoknow.co.uk,  for courgette and lime muffins, which sounded fresh and summery and different to most of the recipes I'd looked at. I decided I wouldn't add the frosting - it seems superfluous for muffins!

At this point I thought of the blogging baking challenges that I usually take part in every month - could these muffins somehow be used for one of them? Fresh, summery flavours spoke to me of fresh fruit, and I just happened to have a bowl of French peaches which were rapidly ripening. I decided to add a slice of peach to some of the muffins, and enter them into the AlphaBakes challenge, which this month is featuring the letter P. I cut a peach into 8 wedges and added a slice to the top of 8 of the 12 muffins, before baking. As my courgettes were so large, I quartered one lengthways and removed the centre seedy area, before grating. Other than this, I followed the recipe exactly.

These were really pretty and tasted good too! The lime zest and green skin from the courgettes flecked the crumb with green, although the courgettes didn't seem to add anything to the flavour. In the muffins with added peach slices, the flavours of peach and lime blended together surprisingly well. The muffins with the peach slices didn't rise as evenly as the plain muffins, but it was good to eat a large chunk of peach in the muffin - and I think adding small chunks of fruit might have made the batter too wet. I was also impressed by how light these muffins were - either I'm getting better at making muffins, or better at choosing recipes!

The AlphaBakes Challenge is a monthly baking challenge to make something  featuring a randomly chosen letter - this can be part of the name of the product or one of the major ingredients. It is hosted jointly by Caroline, from Caroline Makes, and Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker, who take turns to generate a random letter and collate the entries. This month Caroline picked the letter P.

Stone Fruit Yogurt Cake

The scare over E. coli carried on Spanish fruit and veg has had one benefit for me - loads of 'reduced to clear' peaches and nectarines in the supermarket, as well as salad stuff. Now that the Spaniards are deemed not to be at blame, I have no worries about using their imported produce - well washed of course, if eaten raw.

This Stone Fruit Yogurt Cake from Dan Lepard was the starting point for using some of the peaches I bought. This is a cake which is very much liked by C at Cake, Crumbs and Cooking, and every time I saw a version there it made me want to try it, but this is the first opportunity I've had to bake it using what I had in stock, rather than having to buy fruit especially for it.

If there's a choice of peaches or nectarines to eat raw, the nectarines, with their smooth skin, always win out over fuzzy peaches, which meant that the peaches were getting past their best. I skinned four small peaches for this recipe, using three sliced for the fruit topping, and one chopped and added to the cake batter. To improve the colour and flavour, I added about 50g of frozen raspberries to the topping and another 50g to the cake batter.

The instructions say to line the cake tin with foil, and then oil the foil. I cannot stress how important this is, especially if using a springform tin, and how important it is to make sure there are no holes in the foil. Despite using extra thick foil, and treating it really carefully, I must have torn it somewhere, as there was an escape of sugary fruit juices which burnt onto the oven floor during cooking, with a quite unpleasant smell. The foil also needs to be well-oiled, as I left some of the fruit behind, stuck to the foil, when I turned out the cake, and had to quickly put the pieces back into place on top of the cake - talk about a tough jigsaw! The sticking might have more to do with losing the juices during baking than not oiling the foil well, but it's a point to note for the future

This is a really lovely cake, moist and lemony with the fruit adding extra flavour and texture. The frozen raspberries had thawed by the time they were mixed into the batter and the juice gave little ripples of pink throughout the cake, as well as concentrated bursts of flavour from the fruit. The peaches alone did not have a strong flavour, but adding the raspberries gave a complimentary boost to the overall flavour.

I didn't get the really fine, close texture that C got with her cake, but I suspect this was because I hurried the mixing process, and didn't let my butter warm up enough before creaming it with the sugar. Because I've been baking with oil a lot, recently, I'd forgotten how important this stage is. And don't worry that I'm sabotaging CT's diet, he wouldn't eat this sort of cake anyway - fresh fruit is not one of his greatest loves! He's finishing up the previous chocolate cake while the rest of us eat this one.