I eat a lot of bananas, but I don’t really like them when they are baked into a cake, if I’m being honest.
When someone brings in a banana loaf, I’m usually not one of the first people in the queue to try it, which is very unlike me. Usually if there’s a cake in the office I pipe up at about 10am asking if anyone’s going to have any. I think 10am is an acceptable time for cake.
However I do always have a lot of bananas in the house, and sometimes they go brown quite quickly. So, it would be good to have a recipe I could turn to if that happens, rather than waste them all.
My friend has a copy of the Hummingbird Bakery’s Cupcakes and Muffins cookbook. I have three other Hummingbird Bakery cookbooks and I do like their recipes, so I took a photo of the banana and cinnamon muffin recipe and took it home.
Sure enough a week or so later not only did I have spare bananas, but I had spare buttermilk that was left over from another cake. I even had one spare egg! So the stars had aligned and I got baking.
The method is the same as other muffin recipes; put all the dry ingredients in a bowl, put all the wet ingredients into another bowl and then add the wet ingredients to the dry and combine.
It was a very, very thick mixture, very gloopy. I thought it might loosen up a bit when I added the melted butter, but it didn’t. I don’t really make muffins very often so I guess the mix just has a different texture from the cake mix I’m used to. I’m not sure my blueberry muffin mix was this thick though?
Let me tell you, when I opened the oven at the halfway point to turn them (one corner of my oven gets hotter than the rest, so I have to turn everything halfway through baking to make sure it’s even), the smell was incredible. Cinnamon and banana is a good smell.
But although they smell and taste amazing, I’m not sure I’m quite on board with the texture. I thought they would be quite heavy because the mixture was so thick, but it wasn’t. Or heavy isn’t the right word, anyway. They’re… dense? I don’t know if that’s the right word either.
I took them in to work to canvas opinion, and comments were varied ranging from: “yes they were quite dense”, “that’s the texture you get when you put banana in a cake”, “I like a dense texture”, and “are you sure you left them in the oven long enough?”. Some people said they were very nice, and one person ate two.
So… a mixed bag really, and I’m no clearer about whether I actually enjoyed them or not.
You win some, you lose some. Like I say the flavour was amazing, but I don’t know if I’ll make them again.
(I’ve just read this back and I’m really impressed with my photography skills in this blog! Those angles…)