These are my sad black bananas. I wanted to make them happy again, by making them into supercake.
What do you do when you have a pile of black bananas sitting in the fruit bowl? I don’t even know how this happens – I generally work from home, bananas are my go-to snack because I can reach them and don’t have to do anything except peel them and shove them in, yet all too often my darling other half leaves a small pile of them on the chopping board with a hint to Do Something About Them. Sometimes they get sliced and flung in the oven to make dried bananas for the kids, sometimes I whizz them with yoghurt, milk and oats for a breakfast smoothie, but today I fancied neither of those things. It’s freezing. And raining a bit. And I’m a bit tired and gloomy. What I wanted, was to make those black and mushy bananas into Baked Goods. I started with these, as I’m a peanut butter fanatic…and as I started jotting down ideas, I thought, I wonder if I can make them flour less… And vegan… And thus, with a bit of science and substitution, the vegan oat peanut butter banana power muffin was born. So so so soft and subtly sweet and delicious that you can roundly ignore how Good For You it is. My kinda snack. Hooray for black bananas.
Superpower muffins. Sadly they don’t come with red pants and a cape.
Made 10 at 10p each:
2 really rather ripe bananas, 16p
100g peanut butter, 53p (I’ve recently switched to Sun Pat as it was the only brand I could find that didn’t use Palm Oil and I’m suspicious about Palm Oil but need to read more about it…)
1 tbsp oil (vegetable or sunflower), 2p
2 tsp sugar (10g), 1p
A pinch of salt, <1p (check if your PB has salt in – if it does, you might not want to add this stuff too)
1 tsp baking powder (4g), 3p
150g oats, 18p
A few squares dark chocolate, grated (20g), 7p
First use a little oil to grease your muffin tins – I don't bother with the pretty paper cases for these ones – and set to one side. Preheat your oven to 180C.
Mash your bananas into a mixing bowl, and add the peanut butter and oil. Stir vigorously to mash the bananas, blend it all together into a smooth creamy consistency. Blitz most of the oats in a blender (if you don't have a blender, put them into a freezer bag, tie the top tightly but with no air trapped inside, and bash a lot with a rolling pin or similar weighty object until most of the oats are broken up into little pieces). Tip the oats, whole and broken, into the mixing bowl. Stir in the baking powder, salt, sugar and chocolate. It might not look like traditional cake batter, but that’s okay, it’s not supposed to – it’s supposed to look like VEGAN POWER MUFFIN BATTER instead. Such a superhero it should have pants and a cape, this one. Spoon it into the muffin tins, filling each two-thirds of the way full, and pop into the oven for 15-18 minutes, until risen and cooked through.
Then – and this is super important – leave them in the muffin trays for just over 5 mins to cool and firm up. If you take them out straight away they will crumble in your hand – still edible, just not so muffiny.
Incidentally, I like my muffins slightly undercooked, moist and gooey in the middle, so did mine for 14 mins. There's no egg in these, or anything that poses a danger really, apart from the danger of excessive consumption…which as I type this, smelling them wafting from the oven, poses a very real threat… So good that I'm happy to give them to the kids as snacks as soon as they get home from school today. I hope you and yours love them too.
*all prices based on Sainsburys as it's my nearest supermarket but similar products are widely available at rival supermarkets and markets and shops for similar prices. If you do find a totally amazing bargain please comment below as I'm sure my readers would love to know about it. Prices also subject to change – if I could I would freeze them for always but I am a humble blogger and thus have no power over the pricing strategy of groceries at large corporations. Sorry about that. So disclaimer out the way here's how I worked my prices out…
Basics bananas that happen to be FairTrade £1.15/avg 7. SunPat crunchy peanut butter £1.80/340g. Sunflower oil £4/3l. FairTrade white sugar 90p/1kg. Basics table salt 25p/750g. Baking powder £1.35/200g. Rolled oats £1.20/kg. Basics dark chocolate 35p/100g.
Jack Monroe. Follow me on Twitter & Instagram @MsJackMonroe