Easy, peasy, red fruit muffins

Last week was baby Pingu's last week at the "small babies" class at his creche. He has now, at 16 months, formally graduated to the toddler class. In order to say "thank you" to the super nice teachers at the babies class, I decided to bake some muffins. Muffins are my staple bake for taking to school, for Bibu's birthday, for example, as they don't require any cutting and are not huge, so kids and adults alike don't struggle to finish them.

I usually make apple and cinnamon or vanilla-lemon muffins, but wanted to try something different this time. I had a pack of fozen red fruits at home, so decided to use them and make vanilla/ red fruits muffins. This recipe uses butter, so it feels like more of a cupcake than a muffin, but let's not be too fiddly about it.

Ingredients (for about 16 muffins)

• 200 gr self-raising flour
• 200 gr sugar
• 1 pack vanilla sugar
• 1/2 a teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs
• 70 gr melted butter
• 100 ml milk
• 1 pot natural yoghurt
• 200 gr frozen red fruit

The preparation could not be simpler. As usual, I start by pre-heating the oven at 180 C. Then mix all the dry ingredients together (flour, sugar, vanilla sugar and salt) in a big bowl. In another bowl, whisk the eggs, add the milk and yogurt and finally the butter (which I previously melted in the microwave). Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and mix with a wooden spoon. Finally, add the frozen (or fresh) red fruits. I suggest you thaw the red fruit in advance and put it in a colander, so that there is no excess water.

Grab a muffin tin (I use one from IKEA, they have small muffin and regular muffin trays) and place your muffin papers, or use individual silicone muffin forms and pour a bit of the mix into each form. A great trick is to use an ice-cream scoop to pour the right amount of mix into each form, leaving about 5ml from the rim. Pop the muffins in the oven for 30 minutes, let them cool for 15 minutes and then ready to be enjoyed!

An easy treat for taking to school, the office or a pic-nic. Pingu's teachers were sad to see him go, but I'm sure they will remember him with a sweet smile..... :-)

Enrolling your kid in a Flemish school in Brussels

Finding a school in Brussels is always a challenge (unless you are an expat and can afford to enroll them into one of the international schools). Flemish schools have a somewhat higher reputation in terms of quality than the French-speaking schools, so they tend to fill up faster. Also, there are much less Flemish schools in Brussels, so that adds to the challenge of finding a good one that is not too far away from your house.

Since my husband is Flemish and both kids are being brought up billingual Spanish-Flemish (picking up some French along the way) we have chosen the Flemish-speking education system for both. Baby Pingu goes to a Flemish creche and Bibu goes to a Flemish "basisschool" (kindergarden and primary school). We recently learnt that brothers or sisters of pupils at Flemish-speaking schools born in 2012 had priority to be enrolled at the same school as their big siblings for the school year 2014-2015, provided they became enrolled until Friday 15th November 2013 (end of this week)

There is a website (also evailable in French and English) that explains the whole procedure -also if your kid has no bigger brothers or sisters- on how to enroll him or her to the school year 2014-2015. I have no clue if anything like this exists in the French-speaking education system in Brussels. I could only find this website which provides more info.

One word to the wise, hurry up!