Below I present the timeline for how this recipe came to be:
Hour 0: Those bananas are looking nasty.
Hour 0.5: Screw studying. I'm gonna look up banana bread recipes.
Hour 1: After much perusing on Cook's Illustrated, I decide upon their The Best Banana Bread recipe.
Hour 3: I invite some friends over for the bananas party. We plan on going bananas in two days.
Hour 4: To make this recipe more sharable, I decide to turn them into cupcakes!
Hour 12: The bananas begin to scare me. They're soft to the touch, and I'm pretty sure we're talking about rebounds-to-the-touch soft. Turns out you can keep your bananas longer if you refrigerate them (even though their skins will turn darker faster). I'm pretty sure this advice is meant for newly bought bananas, but the theory should still work with my close to death bananas, right?
Day 1: Banana cupcakes seem so plain. So unexciting. I remember reading this post from Baking with Em & M and thinking I would crumble everything. Crispier and crunchier is always better in my world. And so I looked for a crumble recipe on Cook's Illustrated--I borrowed one for an apple crisp recipe.
Day 2: It's banana time, baby.
What's something I learned from this recipe? Even when bananas may be pretty revolting to look at, they may be used to make pretty fantastic banana bread.
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| Huge thanks to L for taking these with her fancy-pants camera! (Maybe if I'm lucky and willing, one day I'll invest in one...) |
Banana bread muffins with crumble
Adapted from Cook's Illustrated "The Best Banana Bread" (March 1998) and "Apple Crumble" (January 2007)
Recipe makes approximately 21 muffins
Ingredients:
For the banana bread batter:
2 cups of flour
3/4 cup white granulated sugar
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3-4 mushed bananas (approximately 1.5 cups)
1/4 cup plain yogurt
2 eggs, beaten lightly
6 tbsp butter, melted and cooled
1 tsp vanilla
For the crumble:
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup white granulated sugar
1/2 cup light brown sugar
A pinch of salt
1 tsp vanilla
3 tbsp butter, very soft and cut into three pieces
Recipe for the banana bread batter:
[1] In a large bowl, combinbatter flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl. Mix together well with a fork.
[2] In a separate bowl, peel and mush the bananas until relatively smooth and even. Add the yogurt, eggs, butter, and vanilla to this banana bowl. Mix with a wooden spoon.
[3] Gently fold in the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. An overly smooth batter will result in a rubbery bread. To avoid this, do not over mix. Adequate mixing can be recognized by the complete disappearance of any dry, white elements.
Recipe for the crumble:
[4] In a large bowl, combine the flour, white and brown sugar, and salt. Add the vanilla. Mix with a fork.
[5] Add in the soft pieces of butter. Using an electric mixer, mix until the butter has broken up into very small pieces. If necessary, use a fork to break up some of the more 'stubborn' pieces of butter, and then return to mixing with the electric mixer.
To prepare the baking pan:
[6] Line the cupcake pan with cupcake liners.
[7] Fill each cup approximately 3/4 of the way with banana bread dough. Pour a very generous portion of crumble onto each cupcake.
[8] Bake cupcakes for 17-18 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Time may be modified in order to ensure that an inserted fork comes out dry upon insertion into the cupcake.
[9] Let cupcakes cool and serve. Refrigerate for up to four days.
