Favorite Banana Nut Muffins (Chocolate Optional)

I love a good muffin for breakfast, and these are my favorite. (E’s favorite muffins are these.) They’re a riff on my favorite banana bread, but in muffin form. What I love most about them is that you get both the moist inner crumb and a bit of the banana bread crust in every bite. In order to achieve that crust, I always, always bake them in a greased muffin tin without paper liners. Paper liners are only for cupcakes, in my opinion.

The muffins you can buy in a bakery or coffee shop (or the grocery store, for that matter) are full of sugar and fat, but these aren’t. The fat and sugar are as minimal as they can be, because you simply don’t need that much of either one for a moist, sweet muffin. As with most things, homemade is better for you, as well as just…well, better.

E prefers his banana nut muffins with some chocolate in them. I usually oblige him, chopping up a bar of dark chocolate and stirring the shards into the batter at the last minute, or adding a good handful of chocolate chips. But sometimes, I just want that classic banana bread experience, with only some chopped walnuts as punctuation. You know what I mean? Anyway, you can certainly add chocolate to these if you like, and it will have only positive results. Nothing to fear from adding a little chocolate.

If you have a good base muffin recipe (and this one is, with some slight modifications), you can make almost any kind of muffin, so think outside the box here. The amounts of flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and egg are what you need for a standard batch of muffins. You can switch out the sugar for another kind or a mixture of two, switch out half the flour for whole wheat or all of it for a gluten-free all-purpose baking flour. Just omit the banana and use 1-1/4 cups milk or buttermilk instead. Add a little spice if you want, and stir in a cupful or so of the ingredient of your choice: blueberries, chopped sweet cherries, dried cherries or cranberries, diced fresh peaches, etc. Add a half cupful of chopped walnuts, pecans, or almonds if you like.

Side note: I had fun with the photos for this post. I tried adding some color and texture with an old striped tea towel and a vintage appetizer knife. My challenge is always the lighting. Natural light is best when you’re shooting food, and I’m always doing this before sunrise or after sunset, it seems. And there’s just no room in our tiny place for a mini studio. So I do the best I can with what I have, which is a great camera. I still enjoy every minute.

Favorite Banana Nut Muffins
adapted from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman

2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon fine grain sea salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 large egg, slightly beaten
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
3 very ripe bananas, mashed into a pulp
1/2 – 2/3 cup buttermilk

1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/3 cup chopped chocolate or chocolate chips (optional)

Preheat the oven to 375°. Spray a muffin tin with oil.

In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients. Make a well in the center.

In a smaller bowl, whisk the egg, butter, and vanilla together. Pour into the well in the dry ingredients and stir to combine. Add the mashed banana and about half the buttermilk, and stir to combine. Continue adding buttermilk until the batter is still thick but very moist and almost pourable. Stir in the chopped nuts and chocolate if you’re using it.