Recipe Alert…I am The Muffin Man

Whilst you may think that there is always cake available in my house (and to be quite honest you wouldn’t be wrong) there is also always a hearty supply of fruit- perhaps to ease my conscience for numerous bakes? An influx of bananas of late has lead to a near constant presence of the over-ripening fruit. So much so that my husband commented the other evening, “Why is this place turning into the house of black bananas?!?!” Fair enough- he has a point. I however think it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have some fragrant, burnished fruit lying about. They make for much more interesting and tasty bakes once the process of almost “self-caramelisation” is under way. An earlier post of mine gave the recipe for Banana Bread– a firm memory of mine from the kitchen of my childhood. Having only just finished off out latest batch of this I needed something different to make use of the over-ripe bananas now taking up residence on my butchers trolley. So what better way than muffins- that versatile, anytime treat (but not a treat) bake.

Going slightly off track, I recently made some cookies, Maple Butter Cookies with prosciutto dust, using Moose Maple Butter. I am in fact chomping on some as I type- their gloriously maple sweet crumbs littering the keyboard here- oh dear! However- I digress. As a result of this still have some of the said maple butter left and wanted to try other bakes to use it in. So my muffins to be were to provide the perfect excuse for this as well. Kill two birds with one stone – or bake two pans in one oven (to sound a little less brutal about it all).

Banana Bran Muffins (feat. Moose Maple Butter)

Makes 9

Ingredients

250g self-raising flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1/4 tsp pinch of salt

1/2 tsp mixed spice

115g caster sugar

100g oatbran

75g melted Moose Maple butter (if can also use regular unsalted butter)

125ml milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

3 medium, over-ripe bananas

2 medium eggs

Method

Heat the oven to 190C electric/ 170C fan.
Melt the (maple) butter and allow to cool.
Mash the bananas well.
Sift the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, salt, and mixed spice together in a large bowl, add caster sugar and oatbran, stir through to combine.
In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs, vanilla extract, melted (maple) butter and milk. Add the mashed banana and mix well.
Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients and add the egg mixture, stirring roughly with a fork. Be careful NOT to overmix at this point. You just want it mixed enough so that no pockets of dry ingredients remain. It should look lumpy and pastey – like how a cake batter ISN’T supposed to look!
Line a 12 (or 2 x6 ) muffin tray with 9 muffin cases. Fill the cases to the top .
Bake for between 2o- 25 minutes, until muffins are springy to touch. Rest the muffin tray on a wire rack for five minutes then remove the muffins and leave to cool.

Hope you enjoy!