Banana Nut Muffins

I know I haven't posted in FOREVER, but now the hecticness of teacher training and my NQT year is up, i'm hoping to upload a lot more!

I literally spent the last two years eating CRA*P and, after an epiphany at the end of the last school year, have decided to eat clean. Instead of powering through long planning sessions on haribo and diet coke, I am on a quest to find clean and satisfying meals that will keep me energised in the right way!

So... here is the first recipe idea - banana nut muffins! Accidently picking up some extremely over-ripe bananas in ASDA prompted me to search for 'wheat free banana muffins' on the web. I didn't find exactly what I was looking for, but I have amended another recipe:

Ingredients:
2 1/4 cups of rolled oats
2/3 cup of agave nectar (or honey)
2 tsp baking powder (gluten free)
1/4 cup walnuts
3 mashed bananas
pinch of salt
2 eggs
3/4 coconut milk (i'm sure other alternatives such as almond milk etc would work nicely too)
2 tbsps olive oil
splash of high quality vanilla essence

Pre-heat the oven to 230c and line a muffin tray with cases.

1. Mix all of the dry ingredients together first.
2. In a seperate bowl mash the banana's and add the coconut milk, agave nectar, vanilla essence and olive oil.
3. Lightly beat the eggs and add to the wet mix.
4. Slowly add the wet mix to the dry using a spoon - use a hand whisk to make sure it's mixed well! :)
5. Spoon the mixture into muffin cases until it's approximately 3/4 full.
6. Bake in the oven for approximately 15 minutes or until golden.

I was really pleased with the results of these muffins and they were totally delicious served with greek yogurt.

Happy Baking! :)

Hummingbird's Banana and Chocolate cupcakes

A couple of quid off The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook in Waitrose was all the excuse i needed to purchase yet another cupcake themed book. The recipes not only include Hummingbird's famous red velvet cupcakes, but a delicious array of cheesecakes, layercakes, muffins and traditional American pies.

But this is a cupcake blog and onto the job in hand i set about choosing this week's cupcake. In the end it was a toss up between the chocolate & banana or marshmallow cupcakes. In an unusually thrifty move i decided to use up the neglected banana's that were slowly browning in the fruit bowl.

Unlike Primrose's recipes, which use a mix of plain and self-raising flour, Hummingbird uses plain with a spoonful of baking powder. This immediately had me worried, as the recipe didn't specify a heaped or level tablespoon, would i be able to get baking powder amount accurate enough?

The recipe also called for a 'pinch of salt' which in my opinion was unnecessary, but this could be because i never salt my food to taste. I also felt that at 120g, there was far too much banana in the mix, which gave the final cupcake a squidgy texture despite an additional 8 minutes baking.

I was unconvinced by the banana sponge and wasn't very confident with the texture. After 23 minutes (the recipe called for 20 mins baking at 170c) the sponge was far too soft and after a further 5 minutes it wasn't much better, although on both occassions there was no raw batter remaining. The plain flour meant the cupcakes didn't rise as much as with other recipes i've used and i was left with a dip in the centre of the sponge.

If i were to bake these cupcakes again i'd use less banana (around 100g) and use self-raising flour, or even a mixture of the two. On a more positive note, the cupcakes did have a lovely caramel smell when they came out of the oven.

The banana cupcakes were topped off with a chocolate buttercream, which is pretty difficult to get wrong! The recipe did make the right consistency of buttercream but there wasn't enough to coat 12 cupcakes and i ended up making more. Instead of 300g of icing sugar its probably worth using 500g and upping the butter, milk and cocoa powder accordingly.

Overall the combination of banana and chocolate was pleasing, but i'd have to give the recipe a pretty average score of 5/10.