Cookie Crumbled Peanut Butter Banana Muffins
After a busy week, one of my favourite ways to unwind is in the kitchen. It doesn’t matter if it’s making supper for the night, baking cookies for the week or preparing muffins for weekend breakfast. Something about following a recipe’s instruction, measuring and shifting flour and taking that first bite is so soothing, it seems to melt away all my built up stress.
Yes, I’m strange that way.
In continuing with my mental resolution to make more muffins this year (see: here), I decided to come up with a good way to use up the remaining bits of peanut butter we seem to have accumulated. Trevor loves eating peanut butter on his toast in the mornings, so we tend to go through a lot of peanut butter and will always have a couple of jars in our kitchen at any given moment. Sometimes in the early mornings, we don’t feel like scraping out the last few tablespoons at the bottom of the open jar when there is a fresh container just waiting to be used. (Side note: does anyone else get peanut butter on their sleeves when they try to do this?). So in the last few months, we’ve managed to collect quite a few containers with small amounts of peanut butter.
I finally had the time to go through some of the jars and realized that we had about a good 1/2 cup of peanut butter saved (hooray for not throwing it out!). We also had a couple of over-ripe bananas just begging to be baking into something delicious. The answer was obvious – peanut butter banana muffins.
Since peanut butter banana muffins are pretty common, I decided to jazz up a few by sprinkling chocolate cookie crumbs on the tops before putting them in the oven. Now I wish I did this to all of them because the cookie crumbs really makes this recipe shine. Chocolate, peanut butter and bananas – has there been a more perfect pairing?
Cookie Crumbled Peanut Butter Banana Muffins
Ingredients:
- 1/4 cup butter/margarine, softened
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 2 eggs
- 2 ripe bananas, mashed
- 1/2 cup peanut butter (smooth or crunchy)
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 1/2 cups flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup chocolate chips (optional)
- Cookie crumbs, for sprinkling
Directions:
- Preheat your oven to 350*F and prepare your muffin tin either with non-stick cooking spray or baking liners.
- In a medium sized bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and chocolate chips Set aside.
- In a large mixing bowl, cream together the softened butter/margarine and brown sugar. Add eggs, mashed bananas, peanut butter and vanilla extract until well incorporated.
- Using a wooden spoon, combine flour mixture with the wet mixture until just mixed (do not over-stir mixture!).
- Evenly divide the batter into the 12 muffins cups and sprinkle with cookie crumbs. Bake for 15 minutes until the tops are brown.
- Remove from the oven and let sit for a few minutes to cool before removing from the pan.
Recipe adapted from For the Love of Cooking