Banana-Chocolate-Walnut Muffins

I sometimes - ok, quite often - find myself with over-ripe bananas. I don't eat bananas much, and when I do, I like them to be almost under-ripe. As soon as they start turning brown, I refuse to eat them. (Not like my aunt's dog, Stumpan - she loves banana, and has one for her night-time snack EVERY single night. And she'll eat them green, yellow or brown.) But, the good news is, over-ripe bananas are excellent in baked goods. This morning, I felt like making muffins. I don't really eat a lot of muffins myself, but everyone else seems to love them, especially my dad. And they're so easy to stick in the freezer.

I started with a recipe from Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess, then changed it slightly by adding walnuts and chopped dark chocolate to spruce things up a bit. (Oh, and I fiddled with some other things, too - for instance, I'm totally out of vanilla extract, so I used an entire bean instead.) The nice thing about these is that they're not very sweet, nor are they very rich. They're low on fat, and use honey instead of sugar - and not very much, either. Best of all - they taste wonderful.

Banana-Chocolate-Walnut Muffins
Based on a recipe by Nigella Lawson
makes 18 small muffins

30 g salted butter
60 g honey
1 vanilla bean
3 medium very ripe bananas
150 g flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
dash of cinnamon
100 g dark chocolate, roughly chopped
small handful - about 50 g - of walnuts, broken into pieces

Preheat the oven to 190°C. Melt the butter and the honey in a small saucepan, set aside. Mash the bananas. Split the vanilla bean and scrape out the seeds into the banana. In a bowl, mix flour with baking powder, baking soda and cinnamon. Add the melted butter-honey mixture to the bananas, and add this to the flour mixture. Blend carefully, but don't overmix it. Add the chocolate pieces and the walnuts. Spoon into paper muffin liners in muffin tins, and bake for 14-16 minutes.

Bananmuffins med choklad och valnöt