We really DO eat too much...

On Saturday I decided to do some baking. I'd had a very busy month at work and Saturday was my first chill out weekend since Christmas. So I decided to bake some muffins and had a look through my recipes. I fished out an old recipe card, one I'd inherited from Mum, for apple and raisin muffins. The card looked like it came from the 70's or 80's but the recipe seemed straightforward - and at the bottom it said 125 calories per muffin!

Wow I thought. I have a Starbucks muffin once in a while and the lowest calorie one clocks in about 275 (skinny something fruit or other muffin) all the way up to about 600 for a double chocolate or equivalent. As an aside my local have stopped doing the breakfast bran muffin which disappointed me a lot - although even that had about 550 calories. The day I found that out was a huge shock - lesson learnt that healthy does not always equal low calorie, and that muffins are essentially cake even if they are full of bran and pine nuts and things.

Anyway, I digress. I found my muffin tin and muffin cases and started cooking. The recipe said it made 16 muffins - my tin only held 12 but whatever, I'd make them a bit bigger. However when I had finished the mixture and started putting it in the cases I spotted the reason for the low calorie count - they were going to be tiny! The finished muffins (and I only made 11 in the end) filled about half of the muffin case rather than muffining over the top! I should have used normal fairy cake cases.

No wonder we were all thinner in the 80's - our muffins were less than half the size! Anyway, they tasted pretty nice. I would have taken a picture but Choc Chip was out for the day and had taken the camera and by the time I remembered, I'd eaten most of the rest or put them in the freezer.

It always bugs me that the sandwich shops have such massive pieces of cake - and the above would show this is not an unreasonable moan. People say to me, well just eat half and save the other half for another day. Unfortunately that never works - I think about the other half all afternoon and end up scoffing it anyway. I'd rather pay half price for half a piece.

The joys of cake.......