Official First Post - Banana Muffins

I decided to start a blog about cooking; because everyone needs a hobby right? What better time to start one than a month before exams, because I just have so much free time; or not.  So for a quick description of why this blog I will just say for now that I like to cook and create recipes, so I will post recipes that I have either created or modified.  This will accomplish two things: first, I will be more likely to record my recipes for future use; and second, I will be better be able to share them with friends...and the world?  Eventually, I will do more than post a few recipes and actually develop the blog more, but I will just start sharing for now.

Due to some recent changes in diet, I have been forced to use my albeit amateur know-how-of-cooking to be extra creative in the kitchen, which absolutely is pushing my ego through the roof right now. Nothing is more satisfying that accomplishing a new trick in the kitchen.Ego, what ego?

I came up with the following recipe for Banana Muffins to use up two bananas.  Since I have gone off dairy and sugar, I had to come up with something that would both be sweet and fluffy.

Banana Muffins - Dairy-Free/Sugar-Free/Gluten-Free Alternate (untried)

Two (Long) Ripe Bananas mashed

4 eggs separated

1 tsp. baking soda

1.5 tsp. baking powder

1-1.5 inches of vanilla bean scraped*

a dash of salt 

1.5 cups Almond Milk

1/4 cup grape seed oil

5 drops stevia liquid (10 for a sweeter muffin)

1 cup Brown rice Flour

1-1.5 cups Spelt Flour**

1 cup of Quinoa soaked overnight (drained and rinsed)

Oven pre-heat: 350°F

1. Blend with mixer the mashed bananas with the 4 egg yolks, vanilla bean, salt, stevia, and leavening agents. Add almond milk and oil.
2. Add quinoa and flour, stir with mixer until just blended.
3. Whip egg whites until stiff peaks form and fold in by hand (it does does not have to be perfectly blended; do this more like you would for pancakes).
4. Bake at 350°F. 25 minutes for mini’s - rotate if necessary.  1 hour+ for larger muffins. Cook until a knife (or toothpick) comes out with a few moist crumbs.  As long as you don't see uncooked batter on the knife, it is done.  

Makes: 12 large-medium and 36 mini’s; or you can do 24 medium muffin’s. 

Recipe Notes:

The first batch came out fluffy and lightly sweet.  I only used 5 drops of stevia, but you could use more.  It is a powerful sweetener, so I did not want to over do it.  I did them in papers, but due to their highly moist insides, you easily could go without paper liners.  If you do, you could perforate one side of the bottom after they come out of the oven to let steam escape.  You could also cut the almond milk by a half or quarter cup and leave everything else the same to make it less moist. 

You could probably leave out the Quinoa without needing a substitute, but it adds some texture, protein, and calcium.  Quinoa also adds its own flavor.

I suspect this recipe would also make great banana pancakes. Feel free to try this, and let me know how it works.

It would be hard to make this vegan, because the whipped whites are needed to give the muffins some structure.  Since I do not do a lot of vegan cooking, I do not know the solution to this.  

*For this first attempt I did not get to use the vanilla bean, because I could not find some at a price I was willing to pay.  I used 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract instead, which does contain sugar (but a negligible amount given the overall size of the recipe). 

**Since I just made the first batch two days ago, I have not developed an effective gluten-free version yet.  Spelt is low in gluten, and since I have been told that I can have a little gluten, I will be using spelt some of the time.  However, if you need to go gluten-free try using buckwheat flour or other heaver weight gluten-free flour or all brown rice flour.  Buckwheat has it’s own strong flavor, so you may want to use a more neutral flour.  Be sure to add a tablespoon of guar gum (derived from corn) or xanthan gum (derived from bacteria) for help with volume. 

Nearly six months later, 

I finally post a picture from when I made the muffins.