Banana Pineapple Muffins

Oh. My.
Everyone who reads this is probably so tired of reading about muffins. Lots and lots of muffins, I know! But muffins are good! Breakfast, dessert, a snack... they're multi-talented, let's face it. And these ones. Well, I could gobble down about 12. Whole. That's how good they are. Except if I ate them whole I guess I wouldn't really taste all the banana pineapple goodness. And I certainly wouldn't want that.

Anyway, my original inspiration for this recipe was, naturally, bananas going bad on our counter. Also, this recipe from The Crepes of Wrath. This recipe looked reeeeally good. Except I don't like coconut (not shredded coconut anyway, I like the flavour though!) or dried pineapple. Or raisins in my baking. Uhhh. But I still thought it looked great and interesting. Especially since I was trying to use up bananas and we had fresh pineapple in the fridge. Of course, my recipe is far far different, so it's posted below.

There were a lot of bowls in this recipe, which I'm not a big fan of. I like one-bowl recipes... they're so uncommon though.

ANYWAY.

Instead of using butter, I used (surprise!) olive oil. I was going to use honey, as well, until my naive illusions were crushed and I found out bright yellow sugar has fewer calories and carbohydrates than honey! Can you believe it? All I had to do was read the labels. Who would have thought to do that? Especially someone who is watching what they eat. Man, I'm dull. Anyway, I was actually pretty excited, because brown sugar has a lot of flavour, and honey... not so much. That said, I know that honey is still better for you because it's unrefined, unlike most sugars. My next goal is to find sugar that actually has some good flavour and won't kill you.

I started by mixing together some olive oil, bright yellow sugar, vanilla, and rum.

Oh yea... real rum.

Next, I crushed some bananas up with the eggs.


In the end, these are what the bowls looked like:

Oil doesn't mix very well with brown sugar, apparently.

But all was well when the two separate bowls of ingredients got together.


The dry ingredients consisted of flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon and nutmeg.


After I mixed in the dry ingredients, I chopped up about a cup of fresh pineapple and threw that in, too.


And scooped the batter into my greased muffin tin and put them in the oven.


20 minutes later, these smelled irrestibly delicious. I cooled them in the pan for a few minutes.


And then turned them out to cool completely on my wire racks.




While the muffins were cooling, I made surprise lasagna for myself and my parents...

after which we gobbled down some of these muffins:


Seriously. I can't believe how good these muffins are. They're so moist, and the pineapple adds a nice punch of flavour to what would be otherwise normal banana muffins. Not that I don't like banana muffins. I really do, but they're tried and true, easy, comfortable, simple, etc. The pineapple is such an amazing touch. Also, rum? Freakin' add it to anything you bake with bananas. It's so. good.

Recipe

Banana Pineapple Muffins

½ cup olive oil
½ cup packed brown sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons rum
3-4 ripe bananas, mashed
2 large eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour
¾ teaspoons baking soda
¾ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
½ cup pineapple

×××

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease a muffin tin. In a large bowl, beat together the oil, brown sugar, vanilla, and rum. Combine the mashed bananas and eggs in a separate bowl and add to the sugar mixture. Beat until thoroughly combined. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon and nutmeg. Stir it into the banana mixture. Chop up a cup of fresh pineapple and add to batter. Spoon the batter into the muffin cups. Bake the muffins for 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean. Remove from the oven, and let cool in the tins before removing to cool completely.

Guten Appetit!