Baking materpieces: Banana-chocolate chip muffins

Hello everyone!!

I´m in the middle of correcting my kiddies´ third term exams at the moment, and calculating their final grades, but everybody has the right to take a moment to rest, right?

In my moment this weekend, I took the time to make some delicious banana-chocolate-chip muffins.It was a bit of a celabration for me when I actually found some chocolate chips--for some reason, they´re not easy to find here in Spain. I guess because it´s not really traditional to use them in our cakes and cookies and such.

The muffins!!

The kind I found was semi-sweet dark chocolate chips. I like milk chocolate better, but--beggars can´t be choosers. In the end, the semi-sweet dark flavor worked out best with the natural sweetness of the ripe bananas I used. They were Canary island bananas, by the way--they´re smaller and sweeter than the average bananas (so I had to use 5 instead of the 2 that the recipe indicated).

They looked good; quite professional!

Biting into them when they were hot and the chocolate chips were gooey was bliss.

The batter made 12 normal-sized muffins. With what I had left over, I made 12 mini-muffins. I could have made 6 more normal ones, but I really wanted to try out the mini muffin cups I bought at IKEA way back in February.

So tiny and cute!

The design on the small ones--the larger muffin cups were plain.

I had lots of fun with this quick project; it also enabled me to use up the overripe bananas that none of us really wanted to eat! I´m definitely going to repeat this recipe again; it´s been more popular than the banana-blueberry ones.

What´s you favorite kind of muffins?

Banana blueberry muffins

It´s been awhile since I last posted anything about cooking! Actually, last Thursday I made some muffins again.

I had some bananas that were riper than I liked (I like my fruit on the green side). In fact, they were riper than any of my family liked, but it seemed a shame to throw them out when they were still edible.

That´s when my cookbook came in--I remmembered that I had seen a recipe for banana muffins. I was right! Not only were they banana muffins, but banana blueberry muffins. I love blueberries, they drive me wild. We always have some canned ones at home, because frozen and fresh ones are insanely hard to find in Spain (and they´re insanely expensive too).

I decided to make them:

 

Though I actually had to make them in 2 batches; I had enough dough (?) to make 18. The original recipe said you could make 12, but since I was wary of "overflow", I made mine smaller.

This was the first batch of muffins; they cooled while the others baked.

I loved how they looked, with the blueberries in them.

They were actually on the small side. Next time I´ll make them bigger.

 

They turned out really yummy. Even I liked them, and I´m usually a chocolate-only sort of girl with muffins and pastries. 

This is actually a good muffin recipe for anybody who´s lactose intolerant; there isn´t a drop of milk in these muffins; the "liquid element" is provided by the eggs and the bananas (which you pureé). If anybody would like the recipe, I can post it.

Baking adventures

So, lately I have been trying to bake things. I´m usually more for regular cooking: I rarely cook anything in ovens (other than my famous Santa Fe Burrito Bake) with the exception of baked potatoes, the occasonal fish or pizza and very rarely a stew.

Admire my great skills with puff pastry. (or not)

It has meat in it! And cheese! And peppers! What more could anyone possibly want?









I like salty things over sweet things, generally speaking. It´s one of the reasons why I´ve never been particularly interested in baking. besides, I already have one friend whose cosmic duty is to provide me with brownies and muffins; why would I want to go through the effort of making ones myself? Simple: I was bored, and made the mistake of looking though this book:

<-- It´s 10 cookbooks in 1! You could smash someone´s toe into a pulp with it. Don´t drop it!

They have one whole "cookbook" dedicated solely to muffins. Guess what? Not all muffins have to be sweet. See where I´m going? After drooling over the peperoni muffins, the three-pepper muffins, the herbed muffins, the bacon (BACON!!!) muffins.....I finally decided that I needed to do something. Fast. So, I made: 

Sausage Muffins of DOOM!!

Though tecnically, they´re called sausage cornbread muffins (I think my name suits them best though). I gorged on them. So did my Dad. They disappeared in two sittings. I can just imagine how delicious these would taste, as a side to an "american breakfast": orange juice, hash browns, pancakes and bacon (lots of bacon!). Must make more in the future. It was a nice baking experiment, and the first time I baked muffins.


Unfortunately, not everyone in my family was overjoyed at the thought of the sheer deliciousness of a muffin combined with that drooliciousness characteristic of sausages/hot dogs. My Mom and my brother both have sweet tooths a mile wide. So, for them I made:

Behold: Brownie muffins!

They´re really chocolate muffins with chopped almonds added in, but let me have my happy moment by combining two great ideas: brownies and muffins. Yum. They were very good too (if the speed at which my brother and mother proceeded to scarf them down was any indication). Second cooking experiment: A-OK, pass with flying colors!!

Unfortunately, yesterday I tried to bake some muffins as a gift for my aunt. My parents are visiting her and my cousins, and they (naturally) heard about my Mad Muffin Skillz. They wanted muffins, and they wanted them NOW! Or, well, THEN! So I set up everything, did exactly the same things as before---and to my horror, found the gorgeous beautiful muffins acting like dying souffles once I took them out of the oven. Deeeeeeeflate! How horrible, my poor muffin babies. Figures that the at-home muffins would look great, but the guest-family muffins would look like.....you can imagine what they looked like.

CRATER MUFFINS!

My brother had a great idea, though--the crater that was left in the center of each muffin was just perfect....for vanilla ice-cream! So we ended up eating something like this:

The flavor was every bit as good as the regular muffins, and the icecream was a great idea. Sometimes I think that my brother might be a genius. Then he goes and does something stupid, and I change my mind.


In the end we determined that the cause for my choco-soufflé panic was no other than....the baking powder. Darnit, we switched brands from one baatch to the other, and the powder in the second batch was much stronger and caused the muffins to rise excessively. Oh well. Lesson learned.

New recipe: Chocolate-almond muffin craters, for use with vanilla icecream.