Banana and peanut butter muffins

I watched a few more of SeriousCakes videos on YouTube this morning. That woman can do things with buttercream that just leave me in awe, truly. If you have a few minutes take a look at the Carousel cake or the Hydrangea cupcakes (going to be trying that technique sometime this week, time permitting). I made the mistake of watching before breakfast, and of watching her decorate a peanut butter cake; and that was it. The craving for peanut butter began.

Google turned up quite a few peanut butter muffin recipes, but The Goddess's Kitchen had a nice recipe from Rachel Allen for Banana and Peanut Butter muffins. They looked great in the picture and so I set about making them. They were quick to put together, I made a half a batch which should theoretically have been 6 muffins but ended up making 12! I added in some chocolate chips for additional nomminess (my new word for the day) and subbed vegetable oil for melted butter because, after a week of constant colds and headaches I'm behind with my washing up and didn't have a spare pan just to melt butter *insert blushing smiley here*

I'd expected them to be quite heavy between the peanut butter, the oats and the banana but actually they were incredibly light! The flavour was a great balance between the peanuts and the banana, and the chocolate was a good addition. We had two each for brekkie. Delicious!

Banana Muffins

Bananas.  We love them, and yet there always seems to be that few that go brown and don't get eaten (especially as I myself like my nana's barely ripe, there's like a 24 hour window in which I will actually eat one before the flavour gets too ester-y for me and I give up on them.  However brown bananas give us opportunities for bakery, and necessity is the mother of invention.  So when I have a few brown nanas I either bake up some sugar free banana bread (I will blog this one day, it so good you'd never know it was sugar free), make banana pancakes or banana muffins.

Scouting around for a new nana muffin recipe to try I came across this one on the BBC Good Food site.  It looked simple and tasty, and didn't have a high sugar frosting to it so was more suitable for the bevy of under 5's I was planning on feeding them to!  A simple walnut adorned the top.

They rose beautifully, the recipe says it makes 10 but it easily made 12.  Their surprisingly light and the banana isn't overpowering.  I'm sure they would taste awesome with a cream cheese frosting, or served with creme freche as the recipe suggests, but they were also really, really good plain!