The great cooking chocolate conspiracy

For the last few months, I have been making a weekly batch of chocolate/orange muffins using a Donna Hay recipe. I am now up to batch eight, and none of them have looked remotely like the muffins on the cover of her magazine. I must ask her art director to pop over one day and tell me the best way to light the muffins when I pull them out of the oven and plonk them on the bench.

Apart from the colouring, the biggest bugbear that I have with this recipe is the leftovers. It calls for a cup of sour cream. The only way to buy sour cream is in a 300gm tub, and I found that this equates to a cup and a bit. What am I supposed to do with a "bit" of leftover sour cream? Leave it in the fridge until it goes really sour, and then goes in the bin? No - these days, the whole lot goes into the muffin mix and bugger the measurements.

The recipe also requires the zest of an orange, plus two tablespoons of orange juice. Now I have squeezed 8 oranges so far - navel, seville and blood - and none of them has produced exactly two tablespoons of juice. One produced about 1.5 and another 6. I have also said "bugger it" to the juice and now the whole lot goes in. I have given up even trying to measure it.

The worst offender though is the chocolate. The recipe requires 150gm of cooking chocolate. You go to the supermarket and try and buy a 150gm block or container of cooking chocolate. It can't be done. It only comes in 200gm blocks.

For the first 7 batches, I chopped up the required 150gm and left the remainder on the bench, where it was quickly consumed by the rest of the household. I couldn't be bothered with the last batch and simply threw the whole lot in.

Funnily enough, it was the best batch so far.

That aside, I wish recipe writers would consider shopping and storage requirements when coming up with their recipes. For a bloke, it is so much easier to read "Tip entire contents of 300gm sour cream tub into mixture" than "attempt to measure out a cup of clotted sour cream, which is next to impossible, and only adds to the burden of washing up later on".