At work in Sheffield Teaching Hospital( I trained there), there was a private company selling yummy muffins in a rustic paper cup. I was waiting for a good muffin recipe to experiment my own paper cups.
It was the final day of a leadership course, when all of us had to choose a topic and do a presentation on it. My fellow attendees selected topics like 'obesity in kids', 'my research' etc. I proudly chose to give a talk on Kerala, my state in India and topped it up with a recipe handout and snapshot of keralan chicken biriyani. Feeling very special myself (you know the feeling when you feel so good about urself, what ever else the others think? Yes, I had that moment), there comes another girl with a recipe to banana cake her nan used to bake. I knew it would have been yummy and she knew it too. We were divided up in to groups and she was in another group so I didnot get the recipe.
I came home and started searching for a yummy banana cake recipe. Low and behold I saw a recipe by the one and only comfort-food-queen Nigella Lawson. I knew this was it. I made a few alterations to suit my taste and cooked it for my dear friend Pravija and her daughter Riya. Here is the recipe I used.
- If the batter is thick add up to half a cup of milk to make it thin. The batter should have a pouring consisitency for the muffins to be soft and moist. Buttermilk would be good too.
- The recipe warrants yellow cavendish bananas, the usual ones you get in supermarket, but if you can't get it 'robusta' green bananas are great too.
- For the paper cup, I cut a square piece of baking sheet and moulded it into the trough in the muffin tray. They sure do add a great personal touch to ur muffins.
- Try and use pure vanilla bean paste if you can. They add a special flavour to the muffins.
- Nigellas original recipe asked for whisky in the first step. I substituted it for tea. Nigellas original recipe used walnuts in this muffin. I am not a big fan of them, hence avoided it.
- While mashing banana, a few chunks are ok, they add texture to ur muffin.
- Never use a hard hand while mixing flour or you will end up with a banana flavoured stone.
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Banana muffin
Makes 12
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Ingredients
1. Very ripe bananas - 300g excluding peels
2. Sultanas/ raisins - 100g
Water - 100ml
Tea bag - 1
3- Plain flour - 175g
Baking powder - 2 tsp
Bicarbonate of soda - 1/2 tsp
Salt - 1/2 tsp
4- Butter - 125g
Brown/ caster sugar - 150g
Eggs - 2
Vanilla extract/paste - 1 tsp
Method
- Preheat oven to 170 degree
- Add boiling hot water to tea bag as u would for tea. Give it a squeeze and get the bag out. Add sultanas to it and leave it for 5-10mts
- Combine / seive flour, salt and raising agents together in a bowl.
- Melt your butter. In a second bowl add the melted butter to sugar and mix well. Now add the eggs one at a time mixing well after each addition.
- Mash your bananas. Add the bananas to ur second bowl together with drained sultanas and vanilla extract.
- Add the flour mix to the banana mix a little at a time, gently folding the mixture in.
- Pour this mixture in to a buttered and paper lined muffin tray and bake for 20 mts. A cake with the same mixture would take 1 hr.
Adapted from:Nigella Lawson
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Sherin Deepu
wow.. thanks for linking this recipe to my event. Expecting more recipes from you;-))
ReplyDeleteThanks for linking this yummy recipe to my event.
ReplyDelete