My day was Bananas

My kids LOVE bananas. It is their favorite thing to get at the store and often fight over who gets to bag them up. That being said they will occasionally go on a banana fatigue fast and I end up with a mass of spotted fruit that no one will touch. They will eat them with spots cut off but when they go beyond a couple little brownish bits the stinkers refuse to consume them. I usually don't mind. Mixing up a batch of muffins is quick and painless.
I was getting the yucky ones so much that I couldn't keep up so I peeled them and put them in a freezer bag for future use. I read somewhere that it's easier to freeze them with the skins on so I took to just tossing them onto a shelf in the freezer. Flash forward a few weeks and I am confronted with quit a pile of fruit. So today I was feeling a bit industrious and decided to make muffins and freeze the finished product so I would have a quick grab and go breakfast for those super hectic days (Tuesdays).
I decided to make Chocolate Banana Muffins. What I didn't count on was how nasty, brown and runny thawed bananas were. The muffins turned out great! The extra fruit sugar made them very tasty so I am recommending the freezing process. As for leaving them in the skin? Well it was fun squeezing out the contents into a bowl instead of peeling them, just be prepared for the slug like goo. My kids loved that part almost as much as eating them.

Chocolate Banana Muffins
1/2 cp butter, softened                               1 cp sugar
2 eggs                                                           1 cp (2 med) bananas, smashed
1/4 cp milk                                                  1 tsp vanilla
2 cps flour                                                   1/4 cp baking cocoa
1 tsp salt                                                      1/2 cp chopped nuts
1/2 tsp baking soda
 
In a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar. Add eggs, banana, milk, and vanilla. Combine the flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt. Add to the banana mixture and mix just until combined, fold in nuts. Fill paper lined muffin pan cups 3/4 full. Bake @ 350 degrees for 20 minutes. Check with a toothpick to be sure they are done.

When they are cool, I put them in a gallon size freezer bag, seal and freeze until needed. We just pull out how many we want and pop them into the microwave for a few seconds. I recommend trying out how long, usually 5 to 10 seconds depending on how many you are reheating and how many watts your microwave is.

PAX