Banana Nut Muffins, Take Three

Back in June, I found a recipe for *healthy* banana nut cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. Mmm... Right? No. I forgot to add the baking powder, so they didn't come out right, and we threw away the frosting.

This past Tuesday night I tried again, with the baking powder but unfortunately without the taste. Well, Bill liked them. He even politely told me that his coworkers liked them when I sent them to work with him. But they were entirely too much oat-bran-and-whole-wheat and not enough banana-and-nut.















So tonight I gave it another go, with a different recipe. I've been reading a lot of blogs lately -- baby-oriented and baking-oriented -- and I'm also a huge fan of sequences. What better way to combine the two than to give you my step-by-step night of muffin-making?! Enjoy. And maybe you'll even get to taste one.

When (Bill and) I bake, we try to lay out as many of the ingredients as we can beforehand. Our kitchen isn't very big, and he's usually huffing and puffing about helping (even though he always volunteers, so I think he likes it...), so it's easier to lay out the ingredients than to try to maneuver around each other and find enough clean measuring cups and spoons.















Bill sifted the flour for me, while I beat together the butter, canola oil and sugar.






















Then I started to cut up the bananas, and Bill took over and mushed them with the masher. We combined the bananas with the rest of the wet ingredients and Bill mixed them up.















Then I had a contraction.















Once I stopped contracting, we folded the wet and dry ingredients together to make the batter.















I knew that we'd get that batter all over the muffin tins, and they'd bake and burn and be hard to clean in the morning. Bill got a Ziplock baggie and I poured the batter into it (very carefully!). I cut a hole in the tip and he squirted it out into the muffin cups. Scary, and a little weird to watch, but it worked well. It was his first good idea ever. (Just kidding, honey.)

We filled all 24 muffin cups.













And here we have the finished product, and the not-so-finished product!















The muffins are pretty delicious. They're still a little warm and mushy, and that makes me nervous that they're not completely cooked. But I haven't gotten sick yet, so we'll see how they stiffen up by tomorrow morning.

*Update, July 29: I had suggested that we put some of the muffins in the freezer, to save them, since we had so many. Unfortunately, I never followed through. This morning I went to get one and some of them were furry. :( Both completely disgusting and horribly disappointing. Next time!