Getting into the autumnal/halloween spirit I have made lovely moist butternut squash muffins for English Mum’s Great Big Autumn bake off. Prizes are involved!! 🙂

This is a slightly adapted version of Jamie Oliver’s recipe in his book Jamie at Home. The recipe makes far more than the twelve stated so if necessary halve the ingredients to make less. They taste delicious with or without topping, I actually prefer them without anything else on them. They can also be frozen to be used in lunch boxes etc.

Ingredients

• 400g butternut squash, skin on, deseeded and chopped
• 350g caster sugar or light brown sugar
• 4 large eggs
• sea salt
• 300g plain flour
• 2 heaped teaspoons baking powder
• 50g walnuts
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 175ml virgin olive oil

Optional topping

• Icing sugar
• Zest and juice of one lemon to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 180ºC/350ºF/gas mark 4
2. Put the butternut squash in a food processor and blitz until finely chopped.
3. Add the eggs, pinch of salt, flour, baking powder, walnuts, vanilla and olive oil and blitz again until well mixed. I suggest if you want the walnuts to stay in good size pieces then mix them in by hand when the rest has been mixed.
4. Put the mixture into a muffin tin lined with paper cases or as I did above into a mould.
5. Bake for 20-25 minutes. They can take a bit longer so if necessary use a skewer to help you see if they are cooked. If the skewer comes out clean when put into the middle of the muffin then they are cooked.
6. Leave to cool.
7. If a topping is required mix the icing sugar with water and the lemon juice to taste and use to decorate the muffins. For the pumpkin muffins above I mixed red and yellow food colouring from silverspoon to make orange coloured icing.
8. For the more sophisticated muffin as below, cover in the lemon icing and sprinkle with lemon zest.