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Banana Coconut Muffins

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Yes, I know. This is my third banana muffin/banana bread recipe.

Indulge me.

The Child, it turns out, bought me a really nice muffin pan for Christmas, along with some cookie sheets. I already had some nice cookie sheets but I’m not complaining – having a lot can be handy. But my muffin pans were not good, and the pan selected by The Child – well, it is a very good pan, thick aluminum with big cups for big muffins. The only thing to do, then, was to make muffins.

I had some overripe bananas – I usually do, which is why I so often make banana bread. But not long after Christmas, I ran across a copy of The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion in a used bookstore. I’ve heard wonderful things about King Arthur recipes from numerous people recently, so I bought the book.  It contained yet another recipe for banana muffins – completely different from both Fannie Farmer’s Banana Bread and Biloxi Banana Bread.

The King Arthur book contains a base muffin recipe, and then a list of ingredient combinations that can be added in to make whatever muffins you like. It is a spectacular recipe – yes, spectacular – because the muffins rise beautifully, yet have a fine, moist crumb.

The bananas are not mashed and blended into the batter the way they usually are, but rather diced finely and mixed in with the coconut at the end. I wondered if this might result in less of a banana taste in the muffins, but it really didn’t. I loved the added flavor and texture of the coconut, but it could easily be omitted if one didn’t care for coconut.

Banana Coconut Muffins

Banana Coconut Muffins
 
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Serves: 16
Ingredients
  • 3½ cups unbleached all-purpose or cake flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 3 large eggs
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 1 cup sour cream
  • 2 bananas, diced finely
  • 1½ cups shredded unsweetened coconut
Instructions
  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F and lightly grease 16 muffin cups or use paper liners.
  2. In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Set aside.
  3. In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar together with a handheld or stand mixer until light and fluffy. Scrape down the bowl to make sure all the butter is incorporated, then add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
  4. Add the vanilla and sour cream and mix until incorporated.
  5. Add the dry ingredients and mix on low-speed just until the batter is smooth. Add diced bananas and coconut and stir just to incorporate.
  6. Fill the muffin tins and bake for 18 to 24 minutes or until a tooth pick inserted in the center comes out clean.
  7. Remove the muffins from the oven, cool in the pan for 5 minutes and then remove the muffins from the pan to finish cooling on a rack. Muffins left in the pan to cool the entire time will become tough from steaming.
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This is my contribution to Weekend Cooking, hosted by Beth Fish Reads. Why not swing by and see what other simple pleasures await?

Biloxi Banana Muffins

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Things shift and change, sometimes in extremes – and when it happens, we often seek comfort in old familiar things and routines. It’s easy to get into a rut when this happens; it feels so safe, a defense against whatever unpleasant surprises the world may have in store for us.

But then, things change again, and we realize life has gotten a little bit bland.

So it was this past week at my house. I have mentioned idly to The Child that I “will get to” redecorating our family room. It’s the room we spend the most time in, containing the television and gas fireplace, but also adjacent to the kitchen. It’s a pleasant room that remains – like most of the house – painted the same dull  shade of white that the builders sprayed on the wall when they built this place 15 years ago.

The biggest problem in the room is the television: Where it is located, it is almost impossible to see well from any spot except one. The TV is housed in a large wall unit, carefully selected by me and The Departed and purchased after several arguments, much measuring, and at least three trips to the now-defunct Costco Home.

I think it’s the problem, I say to my father’s wife shortly after The Departure. The wall unit. If I had a smaller one, the TV could be somewhere else.

Don’t get rid of it, she says. It looks built in.

So I leave it. And forget about it. And focus my attention on other things – the problems I can see the solutions too more easily.

But every so often, I run across something that I’d like to do in the family room – most recently, I found some pretty curtains I’d love to put in there. And then I just stop and freeze up. If I hang the curtains, I have to take the old things off the window and if I do that I should paint while they’re off and that means moving the wall unit to get at the walls and once I’ve done that I should rearrange the room and … it all stops.

I mention this to The Child one day. I’d like to do it, but …

Until the other night. I wasn’t feeling well and went to bed early. Don’t stay up late, I told her.

When I came downstairs the next day, it was into a different room. The wall unit and TV were still in their usual spaces, but everything else in the room had been moved as though the TV were somewhere else. I feel like Marty McFly: it all seems familiar, but yet completely different.

When I’ve recovered from the surprise and The Child wakes up, we chat about the pros and cons of the new arrangement. It’s good, but we encounter some technical problems, so we move the furniture again, and then again.

We agree that even if we don’t get it exactly right, once we get rid of the wall unit, we can keep nudging the rest of the room until we get it just how we like it.

We love this plan, and set off to buy paint chips and pizza, and agree that by the end of the weekend, there will be a wall unit in the garage.

I felt kind of the same way when I ran across a new banana bread recipe in an amazing southern cookbook I found at the library, Screen Doors and Sweet Tea. It is filled with wonderful, easy to follow regional recipes, introduced with stories that put each in its proper context: fried okra eaten like popcorn at a blues joint. It’s a gorgeous book, so I had to try something from it.

But could I really ever love another banana bread as much as Fannie Farmer’s?

The answer is, Yes. Unreservedly. This bread is light and spicy in a way banana bread usually isn’t, and it doesn’t sacrifice the moist texture to do it. It has more ingredients than Fannie Farmer’s, but isn’t really more work.

I opted to do the recipe as muffins, mostly because they’re easier to toss into a school lunchbox. The Child loved this bread, and when I inquired which was her favorite banana bread, she said this one was much, much better than my usual.

I feel a little bad about it, since I’ve always been so loyal to Fannie Farmer: She’s an old friend. But in the end, I think both recipes probably have a place in my collection.

Note that I did not have buttermilk handy, so I substituted a the lemon juice/milk mixture described in the notes. Don’t substitute regular milk: buttermilk has acidic qualities that, when combined with baking soda and heated, result in extra bubbles that lighten the final baked product. It is key to this recipe.

Biloxi Banana Muffins

Biloxi Banana Muffins
 
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Serves: 12
Ingredients
  • 2½ cups AP flour
  • 1¼ tsp baking powder
  • ¼ tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • ¼ tsp salt
  • ¼ tsp nutmeg
  • pinch of ground cloves
  • 1½ cups mashed ripe bananas (about three large bananas)
  • ¼ cup buttermilk
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • ½ tsp grated lemon zest
  • ½ cup melted butter (one stick)
  • ¼ cup packed brown sugar
  • ½ cup sugar
  • 3 large eggs
  • 1 cup chopped pecans
Instructions
  1. Preheat oven to 350°. Line a 12-cup muffin pan with paper muffin cups.
  2. In a medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, and cloves.
  3. In a separate bowl, mash bananas and combine with buttermilk, vanilla, and lemon zest.
  4. Using a stand mixer, beat melted butter and sugars together for 5 minutes. Add half the flour mixture, followed by half the banana mixture, mixing until just combined. Repeat. Add pecan pieces if using.
  5. Spoon the batter into the muffin cups. Bake for 25-30 minutes, until golden brown on top and a toothpick comes out clean.
Notes
If you don't have buttermilk handy, you can substitute as follows: put ¾ tsp of lemon juice into a measuring cup; fill to the ¼ measure with milk. Let stand 2 minutes. This will give your milk the acidic qualities you are looking for with buttermilk and save you a trip to the store. If you prefer to make this as a loaf of banana bread, use a loaf pan and bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes.
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This is my contribution to Weekend Cooking, hosted by Beth Fish Reads. Why not swing by and see what other simple pleasures await?

Fannie Farmer’s Banana Bread

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One of the things I want to do this year is move. When The Departed left, initially I spent a lot of time on spreadsheets, working out the economics of staying in my house. Why should I be forced to move? I thought.

But the longer The Child and I rattled around the house by ourselves, the more we realized – we didn’t really like it. It’s too big for two people, but more than that: it’s too generic for these two people.

I poked around online at ads for house rentals, apartments, townhouses, and ran across an ad for an older house, described as “cozy,” which is of course code for “small.” It hadn’t been updated in some time, and what updates there were seemed to be in keeping with the 1940’s character of the place.

I want that house, I thought. That’s my house. In my mind, it is already full of my grandma’s kitchen gear, and I’m crocheting something in a cozy corner.

Home: Something this large, generic house I live in has, oddly and in spite of my best efforts, never managed to be.

I’m stuck in this house for now, until The Departed and I can come to some sort of agreement – or the courts sort it out for us, one way or the other. In the meantime, I console myself with daydreams of a future that is firmly rooted in my past: A simpler world, with less fuss and much less stuff.

So the other morning as I found myself up much too early, rattling around my much too large kitchen, I reached back into the past for some comfort food. While my morning coffee brewed, I pulled out my 1940s-era copy of The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, by Fannie Merritt Farmer, and made myself a loaf from the simplest and best banana bread recipe I’ve ever found.

Best eaten warm, with butter.


Fannie Farmer's Banana Bread
 
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Ingredients
  • 3 ripe bananas
  • ¾ cup sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • ½ cup chopped nuts (I use walnuts)
Instructions
  1. Crush bananas with silver fork. Add eggs, beaten light, sugar, flour sifted with salt and soda, and nut meats. Bake one hour in moderately slow oven (325 degrees F).
Notes
You can use a regular fork, they work just fine. Silver is prettier, though.
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This is my contribution to Weekend Cooking, hosted by Beth Fish Reads. Why not swing by and see what other simple pleasures await?

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