Banana and Peanut Muffins

Bananas are one of my favourite foods.

My only problem with them is that I'm always overly ambitious with how many I buy. As such, I always have too many of them and inevitably there are a couple left in the bunch that go overly ripe before I have a chance to eat them. I'm pretty reluctant to throw them away, and given how much I love to bake the logical thing to do is to use them in a recipe.

It turns out the same thing happens to my parents, so when I saw two bananas on the verge of being thrown out sat in the fruit bowl I knew there was only one option.

I have a couple of go-to banana recipes, but I felt like making simple muffins after the arduous task of a GBBO Technical Challenge. My cookbooks have undergone a huge reorganisation in the last few weeks, and I found this recipe for Banana and Peanut Muffins in a weekend pull-out from The Times from October 2012. It features "10 easy cake recipes" by Rachel Allen, and I'm glad I found it slotted inside another book!

As far as I'm concerned the only other thing that goes perfectly with bananas other than peanut butter is Nutella, but when I made these a few weeks ago there was still an awful lot left of my Self-Saucing Jaffa Pudding, so in a bid to avoid saturating the house with chocolate I went down the peanut route.

Ingredients:

75g butter
200g caster sugar
150g crunchy peanut butter
2 very ripe bananas
4 eggs
250g self-raising flour

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180C / gas 4 and line a 12-cup muffin tray with paper cases.

Cream the butter until soft in a large bowl or food processor.

Peel and mash the bananas.

Add the sugar, peanut butter and bananas to the butter and beat until fluffy.

Gradually beat in the eggs.

Sift the flour and fold it gently into the mixture to combine.

Fill the muffin cases three-quarters full. I've recently discovered this ice cream scoop in Lakeland and it's an absolute revelation: you only need one heaped scoop of muffin batter to fill each case, and by using this tool rather than guessing with a spoon you ensure each muffin is pretty much the same size.

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until risen and golden brown.

Leave in the tray for 5 minutes then transfer to a wire rack.

Peanut and banana really is a match made in heaven!

My only criticism is that these muffins weren't very banana-y, so in future I'd either use larger bananas or add another one to the batter as the peanut flavour slightly overpowered everything else. That being said I'd also consider adding actual peanuts too to give them a bit more crunch and add a more interesting texture.

So what do you think of these muffins? Is there a muffin flavour combination you absolutely adore and think I should try making? Let me know in the comments below!