Banana/oatmeal muffins

I'm traveling and not cooking a whole lot, so the below is something I scraped from a blog of mine that I put on hiatus, in part because I'm over here posting recipes anyway. These are muffins my children love. You can bake this batter in whatever pan you like--loaf, small loaf, muffin, square...just test the center with a knife or straw to make sure it's cooked through.

P.S. I'm aware that the above is NOT a muffin. The above is a tiny little loaf pan that turns out a beautiful miniature loaf of quickbread.

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I've devised a banana muffin recipe (based in part on the Joy of Cooking) that (a) my kids will eat but that (b) has relatively low sugar and relatively high fiber. Give it a try. They're good buttered, hot or cold, and they last a couple of days. We use these for breakfast and for snacks...either way, they're cheap! My kids really love these, to the point that I double this up every time I make it, which is about once a week or so. Caveat: my kids are a little bit...odd.

You will need...
Old brown bananas
Applesauce, unsweetened
Flour
White sugar
Brown sugar
Oats
Wheat germ
Egg
Canola oil
Vanilla
Cinnamon and nutmeg
Baking soda
Baking powder
Salt
Two mixing bowls, a good whisk, a big spoon/spatula
Muffin pan/cups

1. Get two bowls, a big one and a small one. Set your oven to 350 F.

2. In the small bowl, whisk together one cup of flour (I use white whole wheat--if you use whole wheat, cut it with half white or they'll be too heavy), a half cup of dry oats (I just use Quaker oats), and a half cup of wheat germ (obviously, this isn't for the gluten-free crowd). Add in about a quarter teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon each of baking powder and baking soda, and then shake cinnamon powder over it until it's all covered in cinnamon powder (or, to taste...sorry, I don't measure my spices). Shake in some powdered nutmeg (I give it about three good shakes), and mix really really well with the whisk.

3. In the large bowl, put in two or three peeled, super ripe bananas and smush them up. Add four ounces of applesauce, a quarter cup of white sugar, a quarter cup of brown sugar, one teaspoon of vanilla, and six tablespoons of canola oil (or some other reasonable oil, but don't use one with a strong flavor, like, say, olive oil). Add one egg. Whisk it all together until you get as many lumps out of the banana as you can.

4. Dump the dry stuff into the large bowl. Mix until all is moist. Muffin recipes always say to mix until everything is "just" moist, but I just mix the hell out of it.

5. Fill muffin liners (I use muffin liners to avoid greasing a pan, but if you don't like them, grease the muffin pan) about 3/4 full. Put in oven for 18 minutes or until inserted utensil or straw or toothpick or whatever comes out clean. I also turn the muffins halfway through.

Cool, butter, serve.

This will get you about 9 or 10 muffins, good for a number of breakfasts or snacks at about 50 cents each. You can also make this into banana bread. Put the batter into a greased loaf pan, bake for about 40 minutes (or until whatever you use to test these things comes out clean). I always turn it halfway through.

If you think these are OK, I've got a pumpkin muffin recipe that'll knock your socks off.

Oatmeal maple scones

The tale of oatmeal/maple scones 

It all began with spilled oatmeal. Having cleverly stored an enormous cylinder of Quaker Oats on its side, I should not have been surprised when the lid burst free of its moorings and released a flood of oats onto my countertop.

Like any good mother, I flashed on the various contamination-related scenarios, assessing with a deep maternal calculus whether or not the oats would still be usable after having possibly intermingled with a few breadcrumbs and who knows what else on that countertop. On the pro side, I never work with raw meat or other dire animal products on that counter. On the con side, I've got at least one child who climbs up there frequently to acquire a drinking vessel.

Obviously, heat would be needed. As with many of my cooking adventures, necessity drove me to the index of a large cookbook, desperately seeking to build something around a single awkward ingredient I had available. So, I turned to my new America's Test Kitchen cookbook, a Christmas gift, and looked up oatmeal. Lo', the Test Kitchen came through for me: There, on page 488, it offered up a recipe for oatmeal scones that just happened to call for 1.5 cups of oatmeal, almost exactly the amount I'd just hand-swept from my countertop into a bowl.

The rest of the ingredients

In addition to the oats, the scones required 1/4 c. whole milk, ditto of heavy cream, an egg (large, as usual), 1.5 c. all-purpose flour, 1/3 c. sugar with a bit extra for sprinkling on top, 2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, and 10 tbsp unsalted butter. This last had to be cut into 1/4-inch cubes and then chilled. This cubing of butter was by far the most time-consuming part of the recipe.

The instructions

Oven set to 375 F, I dug in. First, I spread the oats on a baking pan to toast for about 8 minutes (I viewed this as a sort of decontamination step); after removing them, I fired up the oven temp to 450 F. Then, milk, cream, egg whisked together, and I added in 1/4 c. maple syrup to enhance the oats with some maply goodness (an option offered on p. 489 of the cookbook). A tablespoon of this milky mixture went on reserve for brushing on top of the scones. After I food processed the dry ingredients, I added in the cold butter cubes and processed again until it all looked like light cornmeal.

In a medium bowl, I combined the flour mixture with the toasted oats and added in the milk mixture. At this point, I could tell that I needed more flour, so I added in another quarter cup or so to give the dough a decent stiffness.

Shaping and baking scones

There are a couple of ways to shape scones. You can use a cakepan, pushing your dough into it to make a nice circle and then cutting out the triangles. Or, you can shape it into a circle yourself on some wax paper and then cut it into triangles as you would cut a pie.

Place each triangle on a cookie sheet prepped with parchment paper. Brush the tops with the reserved milk/egg/syrup mixture and then sprinkle to your tastes and desire with the reserved sugar. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, or until they look pretty much like golden brown scones. You can eat them after about 10 minutes of cooling, or you can have them over the next three days for breakfast, which was what I did. My three-year-old, the world's choosiest consumer, ate only the sugar-crispy, shiny tops and pronounced them acceptable.

Some scone tweaks

If I were to do it again, I think I'd add in more maple syrup into the milk mixture for an increased maple enhancement. And I also put in about a quarter cup of wheat germ because I add wheat germ to just about everything I bake.

The calorie/fat count on these remains a mystery. I can only imagine that with 1.25 sticks of butter, it's fairly robust. In my mind, that's an excellent reason to eat these flaky, maply little triangles for breakfast--that gives you the rest of the day to burn off that butter. Happy baking!