Jan 15

Jan 15 Banana Muffins

Last weekend, I bought bananas to enjoy for my snacks over the course of the week, and in the back of my mind planned to keep a nice ripe banana to the side and make muffins to freeze. This was the perfect weekend to do it, because my go-to banana bread recipe includes sour cream, and I would have it on hand from prepping my favorite ragu! Two birds, etc etc etc!

Planning!

My favorite banana bread recipe is no longer available online (it is an Emeril Lagasse recipe that I found at the Food Network website over a decade ago), but fortunately (for me) I saved it as a PDF long before it disappeared.

It calls for cake flour, which I don't bother buying; for every cup of AP flour, you sub in 1/8 cup of cornstarch for flour and boom, that's cake flour. It also calls for baking powder *and* baking soda, which when combined with the sour cream makes a very light batter. It's practically not a quickbread but more of a cake.

Which is why it makes amazing muffins.

Quickbreads to muffins are a super easy adaptation with the added bonus of also cutting down on cooking time and ALSO self-portioning.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Here's the nutritional breakdown from Fitbit...

Groceries I had on hand... all of them!

butter
banana
sour cream
eggs
flour
cornstarch
sugar
baking soda
baking powder
salt
vanilla

Groceries I had to buy... none of them!

Total monies spent for the entire recipe: $0.00... it's all accounted for with other meals!

Total monies spent for each of these 12 muffins....

$0 per muffin... free muffins!

Baking!

The key with this recipe is making sure that all of the butter is incorporated into the flour, and then all of the banana is evenly distributed. It's a very light batter, and it's important not to overwork it so that the crumb stays nice and light. Rather than doing it with a mixer as the recipe suggests, I do the batter by hand, folding in the wet ingredients in three batches to make sure everything is really nice and even.