Banana Muffins 2020

If you know me you know that I buy a lot of bananas, mostly at the pace of my house’s eating them, but occasionally there is a skip, then bananas turn brown, no one will east them, new green ones come in, I deposit the brown-black bananas in the freezer. It’s like the opposite of your savings account. One day, I know I will have to withdraw all of the black, frozen bananas and make things with them. And so banana muffins.

This recipe came from https://sugarspunrun.com/the-best-banana-muffin-recipe and except for the usual tweaks, it was pretty good. I used four bananas and I have learned that no matter how banana-y your banana muffins are, it makes sense to add banana extract. It is the same principal as adding lemon zest to your lemony desserts- it brings up the ‘banana-y’ profile. I can’t explain it, but I can tell you that Niplac and Frontier making very good extracts. I also may have added some butterscotch extract as I am fond of, and the addition items meant at least five more minutes of baking than the original recipe called.

I make the struesel first because it can wait, but you don’t want your muffins waiting around.

Ingredients

• 4 ripe bananas
• ¼ cup canola oil (may substitute vegetable oil) (60ml)
• ¼ cup buttermilk (60ml) room temperature preferred
• ¼ cup unsalted butter melted and cooled at least 5 minutes (60g)
• ½ cup sugar (100g)
• ½ cup light brown sugar tightly packed (100g)
• 2 large eggs room temperature preferred
• 1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1 tsp of banana extract
• 2 cups all-purpose flour (250g)
• 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla powder and 1/8th tsp of vanilla bean flakes
• 1/8 tsp nutmeg
• 1/8 tsp cinnamon

Streusel

• 1/2 cup pecans
• 1/8th 1/2 cup all-purpose flour (65g)
• 1/2 cup brown sugar (100g)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup unsalted butter, cold (60g)
• Cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 425F (220C) and line a muffin tin with paper liners*
• Place peeled bananas in a stand mixer.
• Add canola oil and melted butter and stir well.  
• Stir in sugars until well-combined.
• Add eggs and vanilla, banana and butterscotch extracts and butermilk and stir well.  Set aside.
• In a separate bowl, whisk together your dry ingredients — flour, baking powder, baking soda, vanlla(s), cinnamon, nutmeg and salt.
• Add dry ingredients to your wet batter and gently fold in until ingredients are just combined (don’t over-mix the batter!).
• Portion batter into prepared muffin tin, filling each liner 3/4 of the way full.  Set aside and prepare your Streusel topping.

Streusel Topping (optional)

• Combine flour, brown sugar, and salt in a medium-sized bowl and use a fork to stir the ingredients together.
• Using a pastry cutter, cut in your cold butter until the butter is well-worked in and your mixture resembles coarse crumbs.
• Sprinkle streusel topping evenly over each muffin.
• Bake muffins on 425F (218C) for 8 minutes and then reduce the oven temperature to 350 (175C) (do not open the oven door or remove the muffins, just leave them in and reduce the temperature) and bake another 12-14 minutes on 350F (177C).  A toothpick inserted in the center of the largest muffin should come out clean or with few moist crumbs (no wet batter) to test for doneness.
• Allow muffins to cool before enjoying. You can try to eat them hot, but if you made them right, you won’t be able to without burning yourself, destroying the muffin and failing completely.