Chocolate Banana Muffins

chocolate banana muffins for tea

If you’re looking for something nice to make this weekend or if you just feel like making a little extra something for tea for the family on Sunday, I think these are a good bet: easy ingredients, easy instructions and yummy result.

Cupcakes by any other name, these two flavours are wonderful together: the one complements the other in one delightfully moist muffin.

Arriving back from my lovely weekend in Selçuk on Sunday evening, I rushed into the kitchen to take these and the two cakes I had made on Thursday out of the freezer.  All of them including these little beauties freeze beautifully.  Our monthly book club meeting  was the very next day here at my place so it was all systems go.

These muffins are actually a Nigella recipe. Now, I can’t say I am a great fan of hers normally – I find it hard to believe that she is really doing all that cooking -  but I was given her lovely book ‘Kitchen’ for Christmas and finally had the opportunity to look through it. The recipes are not difficult at all: it’s the photos that make it. And on p139 a very appetizing picture of these muffins caught my eye. Instead of regular muffin  cases, they were each in a swirl of shiny brown paper that made them look sophisticated and most delicious:  she calls them ‘tulip-skirted party frocks’ which is a wonderful description. Well, I didn’t have these, just my lovely muffin cases that I bought in LA last summer – BTW you can buy them at IKEA but the shape is different: seems Swedish cupcakes are tall and narrow: very fetching but then you have to buy the matching muffin tin .... I’ll probably end up doing that. But anyway, here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

Makes 12

3 very ripe or overripe bananas

125ml vegetable oil

2 eggs

100g soft light brown sugar

225g plain flour

3 x 15ml tbsp best-quality cocoa powder, sifted

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Method

·         Preheat oven to 200C/gas mark 6 and line a muffin tin with papers.

·         Mash the bananas by hand or with a freestanding mixer and then add the oil followed by the eggs and sugar.

·         Mix the flour, cocoa powder and bicarb together and add this mixture, beating gently, to the banana mixture, then spoon it into the prepared papers.

adding, mixing, beating

·         Bake in the preheated oven for 15-20 minutes, by which time the muffins should be dark, rounded and  ‘peeking proudly’ out of their cases. Allow to cool slightly in their tin before removing to a wire rack.

Tips

1.       Make the muffins up to one day ahead. Will keep for 2-3 days in an airtight container in a cool place.

2.       Can be frozen in an airtight container for up to 2 months.

3.       I think this is a really easy recipe and I  truly wasn’t expecting such wonderful muffins as these!

Our book this month was ‘Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand’ by Helen Simonson. Overall we gave it a grade of 3.5 out of 5. Personally, I gave it a 2 so you can tell it wasn’t my favourite read.

a bouquet of oya

I can't resist showing you these fantastic oya which I used instead of flowers in the middle of the table. Oya refers to the lace that village women make with a very very fine hook/tığ and use to edge headscarfs, like the one I am wearing in my profile picture at the top. I bought these last weekend  from a market in  the Selçuk area. They're amazing, aren't they?