Taste of Home

To celebrate the one-week anniversary of our arrival — and use up some aging bananas — I decided to bake a little taste of home this morning. I love to bake, which is why I brought my mixer from home (all 35lbs of it). Of course everything is a bit different here… from the flour and baking soda to the brown sugar (almost non-existent) and “essence of” vanilla. And then there’s the unpredictable gas oven that seems to be quite a bit hotter, in places, than my convection oven back home. Considering all of that, I was a bit nervous to announce my little experiment before tasting them. (Even back home I had plenty of kitchen-fails, so I really was half-expecting a fail in this case as well.)

Thankfully, these were most certainly not a fail.

I left them to cool and ran to jump in the shower. By the time I got out, the kids had already devoured several and pronounced them a huge success. Hooray! We shared the rest with some neighbors and decided we will most certainly be making these again (and doubling the recipe).

Here are the ingredients:

• 1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
• 1/4 cup oats
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup mashed ripe bananas (or however many you have lying around)
• 1/2 cup honey
• 1/2 cup peanut butter
• 2 large eggs
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1/4 cup (packed) dark brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375°F. Line 16 muffin cups with muffin papers or spray muffin tins with non-stick spray (or use the rubber muffin cups like I did). Add first 4 ingredients to electric mixing bowl and blend. Add bananas, honey, peanut butter, eggs, oil, sugar and vanilla and beat until incorporated. Divide batter among muffin cups.

Bake muffins until tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 15-20 minutes. Transfer muffins to rack; cool.

(This was based on http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Peanut-Butter-Banana-Muffins-5456#ixzz22DHQbAxt)