Banana Pecan Muffins

Too many of these posts begin with having something past its prime that I have to use up. Would that I had enough time to shop for and immediately use the best and freshest!

Or maybe I should consider the blog theme to be "ways to use what needs using." That certainly reflects my cooking style most of the time.

This time it was three bananas that by Tuesday were so brown that when I picked one up by the stem, the rest fell off. I peeled them right then so that the peels could go out for the Wednesday morning trash pickup, and put the fruit in a covered bowl in the refrigerator. Even on the weekend I had no energy to deal with them until today, Sunday, when it was more a matter of time running out than a sudden surge of energy.

I used this recipe. (If you read the blog post it accompanies, notice the link to a recipe for banana bread with chocolate chips and candied ginger: that's the bread I brought to the cabin in August, though I took it from the book (A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table), not the blog.

I'd seen a variation of these muffins on another blog that added 1 t salt and 1 T of vanilla. I decided to stick with the original, mostly because I'm running low on vanilla and my vanilla beans have a few more weeks of soaking in vodka before I can consider the combination vanilla extract. I did add a pinch of salt because I like a bit of salty in my sweet. I probably would have liked them better with the whole teaspoon, but I wanted them to be a reasonably healthy breakfast. In pursuit of this, I also used whole wheat pastry flour instead of white flour and maybe that's why mine aren't as handsome and fluffy as the one in the blog picture, but mine didn't seem too dense so I think it's that I didn't fill the muffin cups as much.

Unlike the muffins, the loaf clung.

Muffin tins annoy me by never being the same size as any other muffin tins. I'm not talking about the tins for mini-muffins or jumbo muffins, but for ostensibly-standard-size muffins. This recipe said it made 18, and even though I under-filled my 12-muffin tin, I didn't have enough left for six more, so I poured it into the bread pan that already needed washing because I'd toasted the pecans in it. I was afraid it would take longer to cook, but was too hungry to stay in the kitchen and watch it, so I turned off the oven and left it in after I took the muffins out. That was a mistake because, having sat and cooled in the pan, it was unwilling to let go.

My new sifter

My bananas were small, so I used all three. I also, as always, reduced the sugar, but only by a tiny bit. For once, sugar reduction was unnecessary, perhaps because the recipe source was French rather than American. The muffins were not at all too sweet and next time I would go ahead and use the full amount called for. Other than that (and the salt and whole wheat) I followed the recipe exactly: I even sifted the dry ingredients (a step I tend to skip because until a couple of weeks ago I didn't own a sifter--if the step seemed important, I'd shake it through a mesh strainer).