Christmas muffins

Christmas is getting closer - hooray! My team at work is going to Christmas drinks at the historic Regatta Hotel in Toowong this afternoon. It is a large airy hotel with huge verandahs - perfect for a town which swelters in the heat and humidity every summer. My favourite piece of Regatta Hotel history is that Sigrid Thornton's mum, Merle, and a friend once chained themselves to the bar of the hotel to protest against women not being able to enter the public bar in hotels in Australia as late as the 1960s - this ban seems ludicrous now!

In keeping with the Christmas spirit, I'm going to share another fruit mince recipe that I made for the bake sale - this time in the form of Christmas muffins. The recipe again comes from the Christmas baking supplement to the December 2009 issue of Australian Good Food magazine. Unfortunately, I didn't get to taste these, because I wasn't buying back my own baked goods, but they sure smelled good.

To make these muffins, you will need:

1 1/2 cups fruit mince
125ml vegetable oil
80ml milk
1 lightly beaten egg
200g self-raising flour (I used the wholemeal variety)
75g sugar

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees Celsius, and line 4 x 12 hole mini muffin tins or 1 x 12 hole muffin tin with muffin papers.

Place the mince, oil, milk and beaten egg into a bowl and stir well to combine. Add the sifted flour and sugar, and stir until just combined.

Fill the muffin papers 2/3 full, and bake for 15 minutes (for minis) or 25 minutes (for full size muffins) in the preheated oven or until cooked through. Remove the muffins from the oven and unmould from the tins immediately. (If you don't, the papers tend to steam off.)

Enjoy!