Banana and cinnamon muffins

Despite being a big advocate of fruit and vegetable boxes I have decided to take a break from mine for a while. I love getting different fruits and vegetables each week, particularly ones that I wouldn’t necessarily choose to buy. The problem with my vegetable box at the moment is that there are just too many things that I don’t really like (like root vegetables) and too many others that I find I have to buy every other element of the meal in order to turn it into a meal (like red cabbage). My default setting is to turn things into cake, which works brilliantly with my carrot mountain but not so well with red cabbage. And there are only so many meals I can eat baked potatoes with.

I’ve recently had a lot of bananas that have started out too green and then it seems that the next time I notice them they have cunningly started to go black. I now have so many in the freezer (yes, you can freeze overripe bananas for cakes!) that I really couldn’t justify putting any more in. So I needed a recipe that used a lot of bananas and this is it. I started with the Hummingbird recipe for Banana and Cinnamon Muffins and adapted it slightly to suit the ingredients I had. It doesn’t have as much added sugar as most muffin recipes because the bananas provide a lot of sweetness.

The recipe claims to make twelve but I got fifteen large muffins. It uses 400g banana, which turned out to be two large and three small bananas. These muffins are good with a cup of tea or coffee!

Recipe

Ingredients

350g plain flour

1½ teaspoons baking powder

Half a teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

2 teaspoons cinnamon plus more to sprinkle

160g soft brown sugar

125g natural yogurt

250g milk

1 egg

Half a teaspoon vanilla extract

65g light olive oil

400g peeled banana, mashed

Demerara sugar to sprinkle

Method

Set the oven to 170ºC and line muffin trays with 15 paper cases.

Combine the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, cinnamon and sugar in a large bowl.

Mix together the yogurt, milk, egg, vanilla extract and oil in a jug.

Tip the yogurt mixture into the dry ingredients along with the mashed banana and mix well until all the ingredients are incorporated.

Spoon into the muffin cases and sprinkle the tops with the demerara sugar and cinnamon.

Sprinkle the tops with cinnamon and sugar

Bake for around 20-30 minutes, until golden brown and firm to the touch. A skewer inserted into the centre should come out clean.

Allow to cool for a few minutes in the tin before transferring to a wire rack.

Warm muffins

I found that these were very difficult to get out of the paper cases when they were still warm and until the following morning when they came out perfectly, possibly due to the high proportion of banana in them.

Banana and cinnamon muffins

I’m going to see how I get on without my vegetable box and am hoping to start it up again nearer the summer. In the meantime I am still aiming to buy produce that is seasonal and that hasn’t travelled great distances. I will see how it goes but if I realise the only vegetable I ever buy is broccoli, I will have to start it up again sooner!

Categories: Baking, Cakes, Fruit, Muffins, Recipes

Tags: baking, bananas, cake, cinnamon, fruit, hummingbird bakery, muffins, recipe, vegetable box, yogurt