I’m in this weird phase where I only enjoy bananas in baked good form, which is odd considering I used to have a banana on top of my oatmeal every single morning. We haven’t been buying bananas much lately, but the Englishman recently bought a bunch while I was in San Diego for work. As soon as I returned, I promptly began brainstorming ways to incorporate them into a baked good, and came up with Cocoa Banana Muffins.
To be honest, Nigella Lawson came up with cocoa banana muffins and I just took her recipe and modified it a bit. And since Nigella is the queen of all things chocolate in my book, I knew these muffins would be good and they were. I even took it a step further with the chocolate-ness and added some extra chocolate chips to the batter, so each bite had an extra chocolate punch. Oh yes.
So the moral of this story is if you have a bunch of bananas sitting on your counter make cocoa banana muffins, And if chocolate isn’t your thing, make banana spelt muffins. Or just slather a banana in peanut butter if that strikes your fancy.
Cocoa Banana Muffins (inspired from this recipe)
Ingredients:
3 ripe bananas
1/2 cup canola oil
2 eggs
1/4 cup light brown sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup spelt flour
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
Semi-sweet chocolate chips
Directions:
Preheat your oven to 400F. Line a muffin tin with paper liners or grease with cooking spray.
Mash your bananas in a small bowl and add your eggs, sugar and oil. Continue to mix well.
In a larger bowl add your flours, baking soda and cocoa powder. Fold your wet mixture into the dry and continue to mix. *Note: I used a stand mixer for this, but you can use a hand mixer or good ol’ elbow grease.
Gently scoop your batter into the muffin tins to about 1/4 full. Sprinkle some chocolate chips into each muffin cup and then top with the remaining batter.
Place in the oven for 15-20 minutes. Remove and cool before digging in!
If you really want to make these muffins out of this world, top them with peanut butter. PB + Chocolate + Banana = perfection.
What’s your favorite banana recipe?
I want one with a big scoop of peanut butter on top, because that probably WOULD make them out of this world!
I tried that last night. And it was amazing. PB = love.
The moral of the story is make muffins? That is a story I can get behind.