Pecan and chocolate banana spice muffins

I’ve been looking back at the first 53 days of the year, I haven’t really baked much.

So the first bake for 2014 is banana muffins.  I love banana loaves and treasure my banana bread recipes.  My favourites are those that translate into wonderful muffins.  Most cake recipes will be great cupcake or muffin recipes anyway, with a little ingredient tweaking and oven watching as cupcakes and muffins, obviously are smaller and will bake quicker.  I’m sharing another one of those “tweaked” recipes.  This recipe happened because I was a little too enthusiastic with random inclusion of ingredients.  I was a bit worried about how the spices would work with the dark chocolate, but according to my lovely taste-testers at work, the chocolate studded spiced mixture works!  Hurrah!

Now, if you’re brave enough to give my little concoction a try, here’s the recipe!  What’s great about this recipe is it’s a little lighter because I don’t use butter but vegetable oil.  This also makes exactly 12, count em, 12 regular sized cupcakes.

Ingredients

• 220g plain flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground cloves
• 3 bananas (preferrably at least medium sized), mashed
• 100g chocolate chips
• 150 g chopped pecans
• 150g caster sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 75ml vegetable oil

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 190°C (180°C fan).
2. In a bowl, mix flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves and salt together and set aside.
3. In a mixing bowl, mix oil, sugar, eggs, vanilla and the mashed banana together until the mixture is smooth.  I love my mixer (my nearly 3-year old Kenwood Chef) because I can just bung everything in (including unmashed bananas! the lovely machine does it all for me!) and it gets mixed beautifully!  Add the chocolate chips, pecans and the flour mixture and mix until well-incorporated, scraping the sides of the mixing bowls occasionally.
4. Spoon the mixture into a muffin tin lined with muffin cases.  For more evenly sized cupcakes, I use an ice cream scooper.  Bake for 18-20 minutes.  The muffins will be ready when a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean.
5. Take the muffins out of the oven and leave to rest in the muffin tray for 5 minutes before letting them cool completely on a wire rack.
6. Makes 12-14 muffins, depending on the size of cupcake cases that you use.