Why muffinmoon?

(Emily and her boys at the birth of Zakir)

( Me and my boys at the top of Brea Hill in Cornwall)

The other day someone asked me why I had chosen the blog name "muffinmoon". It was a fair question as my husband had just given them his blog address and it consisted of his real name. Nobody calls me muffinmoon. At least not more than once!

So, I'll tell you how it came about.

My good friend Emily and I were chatting about two years ago about wanting to do something creative and fun and that would make a tiny bit of money for us.

(Graham Coxon in ginger biscuit form)

We settled on creating healthy baked goods such as muffins, biscuits and birthday cakes and wanted to have a strong focus on the homespun, healthy aspects of the food we cook and love. Organic ingredients wherever affordable, low or no sugar, fresh free-range eggs, butter not marg and wholewheat flours. We both feed our children in similar ways. Very little packaged food. Lots of cooking from scratch. Also I love baking. My students were very used to me arriving for my Thursday evening class laden with muffins for them to try and give opinions on. They were hard working people and they looked forward to the perk of a muffin at the end of a long week and to help them through the NVQ course I was teaching at the time.

For Emily and I our first job was to come up with a name and then get business cards printed. We had a few ideas with the word muffin in them, muffinmothers, muffinmums etc.

(Chocolate fudge cake for a friend's birthday)

Our first big gig was going to be the Woodbridge Christmas Fayre that December and so we settled on Muffin Moon to give a kind of ethereal baked goods vibe.

Labels were printed, brown paper bags bought and around 300 muffins baked in one day. We had such fun as we were child-free that day and just spent the day baking and chatting.

The day of the Fayre dawned deeply grey and the rain fell in stair rods the whole time we were selling. We shared a stall with Emily's sister Bess who was selling her homemade jams.

But we practically sold out and had a good time in the process.

A couple of other gigs and a few birthday cakes later and my boy was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. (Frank Zappa rolling his eyes heavenwards at being reduced to a biscuit)

It's fair to say I lost my mojo for peddling cakes to people and had a big rethink.

Now, don't get me wrong.

Diabetics can eat muffins.

Frank does eat cake and he helps me with baking and loves it.

It just felt wrong for a while and to be honest it still does.

Too many people were asking me about his condition as I was handing them a piece of cake!

So, we let the whole thing come to a rest.

My poor students lost out on all the muffins I used to bring to class to get opinions on new recipes.

I worked on bread recipes and soups and salads instead.

Emily had another baby and we are now both of us so busy that our little venture seems like a million years ago!

So, when I began my blog I wanted something that reflected a part of me that was more than just my name. I wanted to blog about my family and my knitting and diabetes as well as good food from time to time. Muffinmoon came back, reincarnated and creative as ever.

If you google muffinmoon, however, you get dogs in Croydon as well as me.

Don't you just love the Internet?!