Muffin Time

Happy New Year! I’m working on a post about my New Year’s resolution that will probably be ready later today or tomorrow. For now, I want to share with you a recipe I created this morning. I make muffins from scratch just about every weekend. It all started a couple of years ago when my boys were taking karate at the Y on Saturday mornings. I didn’t have much in the house for breakfast, but since I always have baking ingredients on hand I whipped up a batch of cornmeal muffins. Owen was doing particularly well that day in class and the assistant instructor said, “Wow Owen, that’s great. What did you have for breakfast?” Being a literal-minded boy he said, “Corn muffins and yogurt.”

Guess what I had to make the next week? And the week after that? It became something of a tradition in our house now. Unless we have to be somewhere really early I still make muffins every Saturday. I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t even have to look up the recipe for corn muffins anymore and we’ve branched on to other varieties: cinnamon oatmeal, applesauce, pumpkin. Today there were three small over ripe bananas in the kitchen so here’s what I came up with:

Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins

3 small or 2 large bananas, well mashed (about 1 cup)

2 eggs, beaten

1 tsp. vanilla

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 cup whole-wheat flour (I use King Arthur’s White Whole Wheat flour)

1 cup all purpose flour

1 tsp. salt

1tsp. baking soda

1/2 mini chocolate chips

*Preheat oven to 500º

Spray a 12 muffin pan with non-stick spray.

In one bowl mix bananas, eggs, sugar and vanilla thoroughly.

In a separate bowl mix flours, salt and baking thoroughly.

Gently stir the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. Don’t over mix.

Add chocolate chips.

Evenly divide batter into muffin pan to make 12 muffins (slightly less than a 1/4 cup for each muffin—an ice-cream scoop is really helpful for this).

Put muffins in the oven and lower your oven temperature to 375º.  Bake muffins for 18-20 minutes.

Remove from oven when a toothpick inserted into a muffin comes out clean. Let muffins “rest” in pan for 3-5 minutes before removing.

*Preheating the oven to 500º, then dropping the temperature helps the muffins rise higher.

            These got great reviews this morning. Even the picky little boy who didn’t want to try them changed his tune. Have a happy and healthy New Year!