Do you know the Muffin Woman?

Tonight I was going to make banana bread. I'd managed to save back two bananas from my fruit-loving kids long enough for them to ripen nicely finally! I knew if I waited another day they'd disappear though, so I had to act.

I was assembling my ingredients and found I had no brown sugar! Darn it! Tom makes great oatmeal and we compete over, er I mean SHARE the brown sugar. Well what's a girl to do? I surfed around a bit for other banana bread recipes, but then started thinking about what else I could make. 

We had a bunch of fresh cheeries in the fridge. Bananas and cherries go together right? I decided to try altering my tried and true muffin recipe to use about 1.5 cups of bananas and a half cup of chopped cherries.

Angela Mott's Marvalous Muffin Recipe:

Dry ingredients:

4 c all purpose flour

1 c sugar

2 tblsp baking powder (not soda!!)

1 tsp salt

Wet ingredients:

2 eggs

2 c milk

1/2 c oil 

Mix your dry ingredients in a big bowl. 

Mix you wet ingredients in a small bowl. 

Make a well in the dry bowl and dump in the wet stuff, mix it just till moistened but lumpy.

Now for your options. Pick one:

Fold in 2 cups of fruit and then put batter into muffin tins. (Blueberries are my favorite! But tonight I did bananas and cherries.)

Or

Put a soon of batter in each greased muffin cup and then put a little bit of preserves or jam in the middle and cover with more batter (I call these Surprise Muffins).

Either way, I usually spray my muffin tins with Pam, but I was out tonight. (Man, no brown sugar AND no Pam!) This recipe made 3 doz muffins (I have 3 different sized tins, one is old and quite small). So I greased one pan with Crisco. Sprayed one with Baker's Joy, and spayed muffin cups with Bakers joy in the third tin. (Right to left in the image.)

Bake for about 25-30 min at 400. Usually I start checking about 20 minutes just in case.

Let cool on wire racks if you have them, otherwise just put them on plates or in a basket.

I took photos as I went tonight. I think these cherry banana muffins turned out great! Poor Tom was asleep, but he'll have a surprise in the morning! Maybe I'll take some to work to share too. 36 is a LOT of muffins!