Autumn cooking: Banana muffins

Like so many others of you out there, I crave comfort food these chilly days. When I found two bananas I had all but forgotten in my cupboard, I got the excuse to make something I've been thinking about for a while now: banana muffins!

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Amazing how something so ugly can be made into something so tasty... Overripe bananas are perfect for baking.-

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Living dangerously perhaps? Or are you all fully able to keep flour and melted butter away from your precious electronics without problems? I managed to stay clean this time, but usually prefer to keep my computer a safe distance away. A quick Google search for "banana muffins recipe" yielded 313 000 hits - maybe I don't really need to make this post after all... *lol*
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Anyway, I started with a recipe from Cat Can Cook that's supposedly 100% fool-proof, and then proceeded to make a total mess of it. And the muffins still tasted great! I added an element from a recipe at Allrecipes - a yummy brown sugar crumb. Oh MY. It was sooo good! Crisp, crunchy, rich, sweet... Absolute bliss. Because of the sugar crumb there's no need for any frosting on these, so they can go swiftly from the freezer to the microwave to the table if you have unexpected guests. Or a sudden, irresistible craving for a snack, which happens much more frequently in my world.
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So here's my take on the good old-fashioned banana muffins, adapted from Cat Can Cook and Allrecipes:

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Batter:

3 large ripe bananas, mashed

3/4 cup white sugar

1 egg

1/3 cup melted butter

3 ts vanilla extract

1 1/2 cup flour

1/2 ts salt

1 ts baking soda

1 ts baking powder

1 ts cinnamon

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Mix together mashed bananas, sugar, egg, butter and vanilla in one bowl and set aside. Mix remaining ingredients in separate bowl. Combine wet and dry ingredients and pour into silicone muffin tins with paper liner (or greased muffin tin if you prefer). This recipe made 16 small muffins.

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Crumb:

1/3 cup packed brown sugar

2 ts flour

1/4 ts cinnamon

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Mix together all ingredients and distribute over muffins.

Bake at 175 degrees Celcius in ca 20 minutes.
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They taste amazing straight out of the oven... Just as good the next day (except for the lack of crunch), and freezes well for future muffin cravings. Lessons learned: One, next time I'll try piling the brown sugar crumb in the middle instead of spreading it evenly over the top, to see if that's more visually appealing. Two, that crumb is going on every single batch of muffins from now on! YUM. Muffin heaven.

(ETA: I tried the sugar crumb in a pile thing, and it didn't quite work out. The moisture of the melting sugar made the muffin soggy in the middle and it didn't rise well there, but rather ballooned out near the edges, overrunning into the muffin tins. An even spread is definitely the way to go.)

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