Tag: Banana

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Date Night Banana Date Muffins

Banana Date Muffins are little nuggets of love.

There is just something so tantalizing about warm muffins fresh from the oven.  Letting them sit until they cool changes the texture.  It means the butter doesn’t melt into the crumb to create the sort of mushiness that reminds me of true love.  You all remember that feeling of new love, right?  That sort of insatiable need to be with the object of your affection.  The desire to do nothing except breathe them in.  The feel of warmth under your hands.  The moment your lips part slightly as you lean in closer.  Banana date muffins fresh out of the oven are exactly like that. 

Except the part where true love doesn’t let you eat.  Banana Date Muffins don’t do that.  (Don’t let you not eat…they make you gobble.)

There are an amazing number of recipes that contain dates in my recipe stash.  They aren’t the bacon wrapped dates featured in so many restaurants now.  Instead they are wonderful baked creations like Yum Yum Cake and Applesauce Date Nut Bread.  Foods that offer comfort.  This is interesting since dates have been reported to have health benefits like curing sexual weakness,increasing energy, and “curing” intoxication. The other benefits are less sexy.  Like dates, bananas are really good for you, but I’m sure that this recipe should not be considered health food.  Without doing a lot of research, (except eating most of this batch of muffins) I am confident in saying that these muffins are likely to add to your love handles instead of subtracting from them.  I suppose you could substitute the flour to whole wheat or even gluten-free.  The egg can be substituted with applesauce.  Instead of sugar, you could experiment with using a substitute, less sugar, or perhaps none at all. Muffin tin

If you are thinking about making this recipe for date night, skip over the scan of the recipe in my great-grandma’s shaky handwriting and skip to the typed version below it.  Banana Date Muffin Recipe

Banana Date Muffins

1 1/2 cup flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 cup mashed banana (about 3 medium)
1 egg
1/3 cup salad oil (or olive, coconut or grapeseed oil)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup chopped dates

Mix together banana, egg, oil, and sugar.  Pour into flour, baking powder, baking soda.  Mix only until ingredients are moistened.  Fold in dates.  Fill 12-greased muffin tins 2/3 full.  Bake at 400° for 20-30 minutes (or until a toothpick comes out clean).

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Tweedle Beetle Banana Bread Battle

Banana Bread

When I shop at a certain grocery store, they almost always have bananas in their reduced produce bin.   I can get an enormous bag of bananas for 99 cents.  There is never anything wrong with them except that their skins have some brown spots.  The bananas inside are perfectly lovely and ripe.  However, we can only eat so many bananas in a day or two.  The rest of them find a nice home in my freezer until I’m ready to take them out and do something amazing with them.  Unfortunately, I’m not always very creative and that something is almost always banana bread.  I have a delicious recipe that I normally use from Todd English’s Olives Dessert Table Cookbook.  This blog is not about Todd English or the incredible recipes he has published, though…

In my collection of hand-me-down recipes, I was blessed with a number of banana bread recipes.  My normal process for recipes is to scan them all in and rename them all then do a quick comparison to see if the recipes are exactly alike. You would think that with the thousand or so recipes I have that there would be more repeated recipes than there actually are.  I had a long debate with myself about how to handle repeated titles and variations on recipes. There are some cases where it makes sense to do a taste test and figure out which recipe is actually better.  But in the case of things like ham loaves or egg foo yung recipes, I’m not sure I’m up to making more than one version at a time.  If we have to do things like compare which gingersnap recipe is better, as long as I have enough molasses and time, I’ll gladly make 20 versions and try them all.  In this case, I made the banana breads a few weeks apart.  I made small loaves and froze some of them for eating later on.

Ok…Banana Bread #1.

Banana Bread

1/2 cup margarine
1 1/4 cup sugar
1/4 tsp salt
2 eggs
3 cups flour
1/2 cup sour milk
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup nuts
3 mashed bananas

45-50 minutes at 350

Banana Bread #2

Banana Bread 2

Banana Bread 2

1 cup sugar
1/2 cup shortening
2 eggs
3 small or 2 large bananas
1 tsp baking soda
2 TB sour milk
2 cups flour
1/2 cup nuts

1 hour at 325.

These are others of those recipes where you have to know how to make it in order to follow the recipe.  Basic method for quick breads, cream the sugars and fat together, add eggs and bananas, mix the dry ingredients on the side and alternate adding them and the milk.  Add the nuts at the end.

So which was better?

#1 is textured more like a sandwich bread.  It’s a bit dryer and very much unlike other banana breads I’ve had.  It has a definite crust.  There was nothing wrong with it, but butter or cream cheese made it much better.

#2 is similar to most of the banana breads I’ve eaten before.  The texture is moist and cake-like. There is no discernible crust except on the very edges.  It reminded me of watching Julia Child at my grandma’s house when she was making some muffin or something and said “It’s so good, it hardly needs butter” as she slathered an enormous amount of butter on whatever it was she was eating. My kids definitely preferred this one.

In the battle of these two banana breads, #2 is #1.