Jenn Plays With Food: Chocolate

About Me

I'm a full-time working mom of 3 in the IT industry, with a great husband. When not spending time with the family, I like to spend my time in the kitchen. I like to cook. I love to eat. I adore entertaining people. I prefer not to go by any particular recipe, but experiment on my own. I'm not professionally trained in any way and I don't claim to be correct on anything I might post. Meals are often tossed together at the last minute. Sometimes I think about them during the day, sometimes I browse my cook book library and compare ingredients of great chefs before me. Sometimes I scour the internet, and sometimes they are literally pulled from the freezer and tossed into a pan.

I also used to dabble in cake decorating. {shameless plug: Cakes By Jenn Facebook}

These are those stories. I play with my food.

Monday, July 22, 2013

More Muffins Please

There are some Saturday mornings I wake up, and if the kitchen counters are actually clear, I'm in an instant baking mood. The girls will typically ask for pancakes and bacon, and often I will oblige, providing bacon exists in the "fridge-a-frator" (Karsyn) and it usually does.

But I was downstairs this week before they were. And in the fruit basket hung 3 bananas, dangerously close to dropping to the counter from their precarious hanging spot because they were so overripe. Gotta do something about that before the fruit flies start swarming. Bread? Meh. Boring. Muffins! Yay! And why not add chocolate chips? Muffins are always better with chocolate chips. Heck, ANYTHING is better with chocolate chips. Besides, if I made pancakes, they'd have chips in 'em too. Oh yes, let's play.

Ingredients

3 overripe bananas
1.5 c flour
1/2 c sugar
1t baking soda
1 egg
1/4 c melted butter/margarine
chocolate chips... just pour!

Mash the bananas in bowl until they are not quite pureed, but have a few small chunks. Add to that the one egg and beat. Add flour, add sugar, add baking soda, add butter. Stir with spatula until just combined. Spoon batter (will be thick) into muffin tins. No need to grease them, and please, don't use cupcake papers... these are muffins, not cupcakes.
This will yield just about 12 muffins only. Put into 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. Let cool.

Kassidy couldn't devour them fast enough. Best breakfast idea ever and it took me all of 35 minutes to make from mash to out of the oven.

But wait, there's more!!
As I put the 12 muffins in the oven, I realized that 12 just isn't enough. I needed more. But... bananas were gone. Thinking, I remembered that I had overripe peaches I had sliced sitting in the fridge! Yes, score!

Repeat recipe, substitute bananas with peaches. And withhold the chocolate chips. My only change I would make the the peach would be adding finely chopped pecans. I did not do this since my girls don't like nuts. But adding pecans to the peach muffins... Oh yeah, yum. If you do this, let me know how it turns out.

But why stop there? Kassidy asked if I could do lemon. I did not do lemon on Saturday, but oh the possibilities of lemon and blueberry.

This recipe is SO versatile. It's based off an old banana bread recipe I got from middle school. So no muffin tins, no problem, drop the batter into a bread pan and bake for up to 45 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. It's never failed me. It's a thicker muffin, but so good with a cup of coffee and doesn't toss crumbs all over your lap like most muffins. The biggest plus.