Baking
Recipe Refine: Pear Banana Oat Muffins
I love the Banana Oat Muffins recipe I was experimenting with earlier, but there’s room for some improvement. I tried the recipe again today, with some modifications. They turned out a bit over-moist, but they’re heavy and delicious — a nice compact component of a breakfast on-the-go!
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups oats
- 1 cup whole-wheat flour
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/4 cup honey
- 1 large egg
- 2 cups mashed banana (about 5 large bananas)
- 1/3 cup coconut oil
- 1 medium pear
Preheat oven to 375 F. Spray muffin pans with non-stick cooking spray.
Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, combine the wet ingredients. Add them to the dry ingredients and mix well. Cut pear into cubes. Mix into prepared batter.
Fill muffin tins nearly to the top. There should be enough for 10-12 muffins, depending on the size you want; I made 10 from this amount of mix.
Bake on the middle rack for 25-45 minutes. Keep an eye on them, and take the muffins out of the oven when the tops are golden brown.
Nutritional Info (1 of 10 servings)
Calories: 254
Fat: 12 g
Carbohydrate: 36 g
Protein: 4 g
Sunday Recipe: Banana Oat Muffins
Wow. These muffins are incredible. They have a dense, cake-like texture, and the oats give each little loaf enough weight that they eat like a meal. I munch one on my walk to work, and it carries me through the morning. Delicious! Next time, I’ll try the recipe with less honey, a whole wheat flour, and a plant oil, rather than butter.
Ingredients
- 1 1/4 cups oats
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup honey
- 1 large egg
- 2 cups mashed banana (about 5 large bananas)
- 1/3 cup butter
Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, combine the wet ingredients, then add to the dry ingredients and mix well.
Fill muffin tins nearly to the top. There should be enough for 10-12 muffins, depending on the size you want. I love to eat, so I made 10 from this amount of mix.
Bake on the middle rack for 25-45 minutes. Keep an eye on them, and take the muffins out of the oven when the tops are golden brown. I recommend eating your first one while they’re still warm!
Nutritional Info (1 of 10 servings)
Calories: 232
Fat: 7.0 g
Saturated Fat: 4.0 g
Cholesterol: 33 mg
Sodium: 305 mg
Potassium: 293 mg
Carbohydrate: 47 g
Dietary Fiber: 3.5 g
Sugars: 19.5 g
Protein: 4 g
Banana Bread with Chocolate Chips
It’s Sunday afternoon, and that means it’s time to bake! This week, the bananas are overripe, so they’re getting turned into banana bread. We have some leftover Hershey Kisses, so they’re getting tossed in there too!
- 3 or 4 ripe bananas
- 3/4 cup melted butter
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1 egg, beaten
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 tsp baking soda
- pinch of salt
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 6 Hershey Kisses, coarsely chopped
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Using a wooden spoon, mash the bananas in a large mixing bowl. They should be well mashed, but I like to leave a few chunks for texture.
Mix in the sugar, egg and vanilla, then sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix it in. Add the flour and mix until it is uniform.
Coarsely chop the Hershey Kisses, and mix them into the batter. Pour the mixture into a buttered pan and bake until golden, about 45 minutes to 1 hour.
Serve warm!
Chocolate, Chocolate, and Red Velvet Chocolate!
I’m not the biggest fan of chocolate, but in Japan, it’s traditional for women to give gifts of chocolate to their boyfriends on Valentine’s Day. My boyfriend is Japanese, and he loves chocolate, so I saw this as a great opportunity to make some treats that he would really enjoy.
First, I baked a super easy red velvet cake, using DIY buttermilk (a trick my grandma taught me — just add 1 tbsp of vinegar to milk and let it stand for a few minutes) and the secret ingredient: 1/4 cup of Coca-Cola. It turned out light, moist, and airy — not bad for something baked in the cheap oven that came with my apartment!
While the cake was in the oven, I melted some red candy melts and milk chocolate, to pour into heart-shaped moulds. I used the leftover milk chocolate to make chocolate cherry mice, based on this amazing blog post from Omnomicon. The milk chocolate wasn’t quite tempered perfectly (one of the problems you run into when you don’t have a candy thermometer), but they were delicious — and I think the mice turned out adorably!
Rainbow cake
After ages of thinking about making a rainbow cake, I finally went ahead and tried it. I used a box cake (French Vanilla — delicious!) for this trial run, and it turned out surprisingly well! I mixed the cake batter, then divided it evenly into six bowls. I added food colouring to each bowl to get red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple batter, then drizzled each bowl into my springform pan from Ikea. It seemed like there was very little in the pan, but it expanded a lot when it baked and ended up almost filling the pan. I sliced up a fresh orange and served it up; it was very well received!
