Recipe – Chocolate and Banana muffins

A friend recently directed me to the My Lovely Little Lunchbox site – full of ideas for baby led weaning and feeding toddlers. I’ve had a good look round the site and found it so inspirational. Will be trying out the pea fritters for Alexander soon! I’d recommend it to anyone looking to vary their child’s diet (or indeed their own!)

Anyway, one day last week the boys and I had to stay in all morning to wait for a man to come and look at our fireplace, so to combat the boredom I thought we should do some baking. As well as making a couple of purées for Alexander, while the littlest one slept Elliot and I made the banana and chocolate muffins. These fit in well with my current attempts to reduce the amount of sugar in Elliot’s diet and increase the number of fruits he’ll eat. Currently bananas on their own are on the “NO” list, which is bizarre as he used to hoover them up a year or so ago! Kids eh?

Banana and Chocolate Muffins
Adapted from My Lovely Little Lunchbox (do go and check out the original too!)

We substituted rapeseed oil for the macadamia oil, and runny honey for the agave syrup.

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Makes 12

Ingredients:
3 bananas
2 eggs
3/4 cup of yoghurt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup oil – macadamia is suggested but we didn’t have any in, so used rapeseed. I guess olive would have been fine too.
1/2 cup agave syrup (we used honey!)
2 cups plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
3 heaped tablespoons cocoa

Heat your oven to 180 degrees centigrade. Put muffin cases into a 12 hole muffin tin.

Mash bananas and mix in all wet ingredients, whisk until well combined.

Sift in all dry ingredients, mix well.

The recipe I followed suggested using the 1/4 cup measure to spoon the mix into the cases, and I have to say what a genius idea! Even with a three year old “helping” me, that made it really easy. One cupful in each case!

15-20 mins in the oven and you’ve got some lovely muffins. I think I’ll look out for some macadamia nut oil and agave syrup as it would be great to taste the original recipe also.

Perfect after lunch treat after a boring Friday morning 🙂

Siblings – July

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Hello July!

This month – since the last Siblings post – we have seen major developments in Alexander’s abilities – at nearly seven months old he can now sit up really well and this means he can start to interact more when Elliot is playing.

Elliot is such a loving and caring big brother, always ready to talk to Alexander and tell him what’s going on, and he’s really good at keeping him occupied with toys and cuddles. He loves riding on the buggy board as he gets to talk to Alexander and let me know each time Alex smiles at him.

Elliot frequently tells us he loves his little brother – ok so I am sure that may change as the years progress but it’s really heart melting at the moment.

This month’s siblings photos were taken yesterday as Alexander started playing with our wooden alphabet blocks. Elliot soon got excited about it and they actually (almost) started playing together. It was so cute (and yes I got carried away and started spelling with the blocks…)

These two really are very cool kids. I’m so proud of my little family!

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