Banana and Chocolate Muffins

You'd be bananas not to try one.

Finishing your degree can be kind of bleak. After months of living, breathing and occasionally fighting the urge to shred your dissertation, you are left with nothing, kicked out from the comfort of the education system and marooned on an island with only a bit of paper and better-than-average knowledge of American literature for company. There’s a whole wide world out there, but you can’t reach it, and no one seems to care that you’re jumping up and down in the sand, waving your paper and shouting insightful facts about Hawthorne, Twain and Franklin.

And then there’s cake. You gather the ingredients, you mix them and mash them and bake them, and then, when the timer bleeps, you are left with a tangible, edible product of your labours. Cake is calming. Cake is reliable. Cake won’t desert you. Well, that’s not true. I can name three baking disasters that have happened to me in recent history. The point is that when it comes to cake, if you focus, work carefully and follow the magic (or rather, scientific) recipe, you are guaranteed to get out what you put in, except that it will now be delicious, and people will certainly take notice.

Muffins are a nice kind of cake to make. They are versatile but aren’t complicated, and they offer a no-nonsense hit of satisfying richness that delicate cupcakes just don’t match. Also, as with deep fat fryers and pancakes, if you put fruit in muffins, you can pretend they’re healthy. With this line of argument in mind, I put a lot of extra banana into these banana and chocolate chip muffins.

Until recently, I hated bananas in their original form, but it turns out that I love mashing them up. There’s something disturbingly satisfying about squishing bananas into a squidgy pulp, and it should definitely be included in any form of stress therapy. Aside from looking for an excuse to indulge my new hobby, I remembered that the last time I made these muffins, I was disappointed to find that there wasn’t a strong banana flavour, which is sort of crucial. I also added extra vanilla essence to really make sure the batter wasn’t bland.

The original recipe was for cinnamon and banana muffins, but that seemed far too grown up, practically bordering on healthy. Therefore, instead of two teaspoons of cinnamon, I replaced it with three teaspoons of cocoa powder. I also added a big bag of Cadbury Counters, and when that didn’t look like enough, I chopped up two tubes of Rolos and added those for good measure. The mix ended up being a pretty brown and yellow combination, a bit like a brownie uniform (the small girl, not the cake – cakes are morally opposed to uniforms), and looked almost split. To finish off, I topped each cake with a generous sprinkle of chocolate sugar, partly because I thought it would work well with the flavours, but mostly because that two word combination cannot be wrong when applied to cake.

The sugar didn’t burn, like it usually does, but became a slight crust on the top. The extra banana and vanilla extract made the sponge really moist, almost sticky in your hands. On my third attempt (I’m a dedicated tester), I managed to find a muffin that had no chocolate in it, but I’m hoping I only short-changed myself. The caramel in the sweets went gooey when it melted, adding another sugary flavour to the banana and chocolate.

In the midst of uncertainty, these muffins came out just right, despite the liberties I took with the recipe, and the bad luck I’ve had with the baking gods recently. Let’s hope my academic future is just as sweet.

For more banana-based foods, check out this recent recipe post.

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