Hardy muffins

Welp, the mood struck me again, and with two sad sorry bananas sitting around birthing fruit flies, I poured through cook books to see what I could make with what I had. Ok that's not totally true. Mostly I just wanted to use my new cookbook again and had to really fudge it with only two bananas.

Here's the recipe for banana chocolate chip muffins, followed by another not-really-related-to-baking-playlist (I was kinda tired so it's a little mellow of a mix):

3 cups whole wheat flour
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp each of: cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom
3/4 cups choc chips
1 cup maple syrup (instead I used 1/2 cup sucanat and 3/4 cup brown sugar)
3 super ripe bananas (i used two)
1/2 cup applesauce (i used 1 cup since i only had 2 bananas)
approx. 1/4 cup water (i prob used at least a cup, partly due to using sugar as the maple syrup substitute)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. Mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, spices and choc chips in large bowl.
3. Mix syrup (or sugar), mashed bananas, applesauce and water in medium bowl.
4. Add wet to dry and add more applesauce/water as needed to make a batter that's thicker than pancake but a little thinner than cookie batter. (I had a kettle of water nearby that I kept gradually adding from -- you get the idea of what the consistency is supposed to be pretty quickly)
5. put into greased muffin tins and bake for 25-30 minutes.



Hall & Oates - I can't go for that


Rolling Stones - let it loose


Smokey Robinson - going to a go-go


Joanna Newsom - inflammatory writ



Billy Bragg & Wilco - blood of the lamb


Okay, I made a ton of substitutions and also made muffins instead of the bread that the recipe was originally made for. SO based on that, I actually think they turned out pretty good. I freaked out right before I was done because before adding the last 1/4 cup of brown sugar I thought it was too bland and then after dumping the sugar in thought it was way too sweet. So I added a dash more flour and a few pinches of salt. Not sure if it was necessary because some of the sweetness seemed to be baked away -- but the hint of banana and choc chips were really nice. Otherwise, these muffins are pretty hardy due to the whole wheat flour, so I think if you're looking for something a little lighter I might go with reg flour. It might also be nice to add a dash of vanilla into the wet mixture. I also would have preferred to use maple syrup but I didn't want to use the last of mine up what with french toast weekend coming up and all. Whatever you do, be sure to let me know how they turn out!!

Oh, so another thing is that this made a good amount of batter. I only have one 8-slotted muffin tin, so I decided to make the rest into a tiny loaf (roughly 3" x 7"). That ended up baking for about 10 minutes longer. Here's some pictures of the final yummers:

my favorite part about this cookbook: watch the top right corner of the book -- they almost kiss.