Welcome back to another baking post, this week I made some banana crumb muffins!  This is one of my personal favorite recipes that I have been baking and tweaking for years, so let’s dive right in.

Mixing Ingredients

Dry and wet ingredients should always be mixed separately (especially in baking), and it’s not just so you have more dishes to wash.  When you mix ingredients separately you are ensuring all ingredients are evenly distributed before combining.  You want to make sure your salt goes everywhere for flavor not just in one corner (having a super salty corner would be pretty gross).  Furthermore, your leavening ingredients like baking powder (ingredients that help a baked good rise by introducing air) need to be evenly distributed throughout the dough so your whole muffin rises not just half of it (or you only have half the muffins in your batch rise).  If you are reading this and scoffing at me saying “I never separate my ingredients and nothing that crazy has ever happened,” well I have some bad news.  You probably over mixed your dough.  While this doesn’t sound like a big deal it is in baking- overmixing dry and wet ingredients causes newly formed gluten matrices to form extra bonds, tightening and strengthing themselves.  This leaves you with tougher or chewier baked goods.  I mean if you like eating bricks please keep mixing all your ingredients in one bowl… but if not PLEASE USE 2 BOWLS.  Sorry about that I feel very strongly about mixing ingredients separately, moving on…

Substitutions

As we covered in the previous cookie blogs eggs provide structure and are leavening ingredients, they are multi-talented stars in cooking.  But you don’t have to use eggs you can substitute them for applesauce!  I know it sounds crazy but during WWI when rations were distributed women started cooking with applesauce in baked goods to replace eggs and it worked! But why?  When eggs are used in muffins it is to provide support to the muffin.  the egg does this by tangling all the proteins up and denaturing into the dough.  However, applesauce has no proteins instead it has a polysaccharide (sugar), pectin, found in plants.  When pectin is heated up the sugar molecules start absorbing the heat and break the sugar bonds- then reform new bonds with itself and surrounding molecules (water, gluten, fats, etc.) providing the necessary structural support.  Furthermore, applesauce often makes baked goods moister.  This is simply due to the fact that applesauce has water in it.

Oven Time!!!

As always some crazy stuff happens when the muffins go in the happen I guess you could say its… B-A-N-A-N-A-S.  Sadly, you already know most of the reactions happening :(, muffins are very similar to cookies, from ingredients to the reactions taking place, so I won’t bore you by going over everything again.  Similarly to cookies, the muffins are rising and creating pores where air escapes adding that signature fluffiness to muffins.  In contrast to cookies, they are pulled out of the oven before they can caramelize and burn.

Conclusion

These muffins are surprisingly similar to cookies in their chemistry and just as delicious!  I used a modified version of the banana crumb muffins from Allrecipes: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/17652/banana-crumb-muffins/.  I might be making something sweet again… my hallway requested brownies any suggestions.

sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1hTK0wGrTg