Kate's Cure for the Common Cuisine: Apple Banana Muffins

I am posting about a baked good. This one earned me a real-world girl scout patch because not only was I able to accomplish the task successfully, I also pushed the limit and added ingredients that were not on the trusted recipe card. When I do that in the baking world I fail miserably but not this time people!

So there I was in Whole Foods gathering my food needs for the week.... as I passed by the bananas I saw a stack of recipe cards sitting there staring at me, calling out "take me, read me, make me." I looked at it, almost dismissed it because it was a baked good but I held onto it. I walked around finishing my shopping and still had it in my hand, just studying it; the recipe was for Banana Apricot Muffins.. However, there were a few ingredients that I wanted to remove. I didn't really want to use dried apricots and I'm not the biggest fan of walnuts in muffins. I have seen and read about using apple sauce in baking in place of butter, sugar or oils and decided that sounded even better, banana and apple muffins. My curiosity and sudden need to bake this won in the end, I grabbed some applesauce and almond flour, the only two things on the card that I didn't already have at home, and I was on my merry way.

I get home and I am still in the mood to bake. Sometimes I have these urges and then in the car ride home I snap out of it, but on this car ride home I decided that I wanted to make them into mini-muffins b/c I never can eat a whole muffin. Great thought, but ill-prepared. You see, I don't own a mini-muffin pan. It's on the wedding registry but that won't help me right now. Instead of going right up the street to get a cheap disposable version at Tom Thumb, I went to Target and I bought a real one. So now, I am invested in this process.

I start to bake, channeling my inner "Mr. Max" mindset of measuring everything perfectly, pre-reading instructions to make sure I follow correctly and all that left-brained stuff, while still not really following the recipe at all with my additions. A little oxy-moronic. As I grab for the apple sauce, I realized that I bought a cinnamon apple sauce and have a mini-dramatic meltdown to myself. OMG, of course, here's the downfall, hrmph. Then princess in my head gets slapped by reasoning and I come to the conclusion that I'm very content with this oopsie. We love Bananas Paradise and that combines cinnamon and banana. We love the Apple Crisp and that combines apple and cinnamon. So all I'm doing is marrying the two combinations to make us a love muffin.

I paced the floor as they baked. Ten minutes in, I could smell them and that passed the first test of "is this going to turn out well?" Then at fifteen minutes in, the smell permeated a richer aroma and they were rising correctly, passing test two. I removed them from the oven when the timer went off, toothpick tested and felt they needed 5 minutes more after toothpick tests. After that timer went off, I was confident. Just as I was thinking, this is too good to be true, I popped one into my mouth and burned the heck out of it. My personal baking flaw #27 - I can't let something cool long enough, too greedy for the first taste. Thankfully, this was the only flaw and we had some tasty muffin bites to enjoy!

Nutritional facts for this one can be found here; one bite sized muffin is 3 WW points. This took 35 minutes from start to finish and to avoid damaging the roof of your mouth, an additional 5-8 minutes outside of the tin to cool.

Grocery List:

2 ripe bananas, mashed
1 cup unsweetened cinnamon apple sauce
3 tbsp. agave nectar
2 eggs, beaten
3 cups almond flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt

Pre-heat the oven to 325 degrees and grease the muffin pan. If you prefer to use paper cup liners, place those in the tin. In a large bowl, combine the bananas, apple sauce, agave nectar and eggs. Stir in the baking soda and salt, followed by the almond honey until just combined.