Banana Flax Seed Muffins

This is a recipe that Drew's nana gave me at a bridal shower last winter.  I've been meaning to try it out for a while, and the two overripe-yet-not-quite-dead bananas on my counter gave me the perfect excuse to make this recipe.  It's an extremely healthy recipe, actually, but you wouldn't know it by how delectable it tastes, especially with a good cup of dark roast coffee.  Droooool.

Let's begin.  Here's the ingredients list.  It's slightly altered from Nana's recipe card because I didn't have buttermilk or egg substitute on hand, but I used 2% milk and an actual egg instead, so I think it probably counterbalanced the calorie count.  

Ingredients for 12 muffins:

½ cup packed brown sugar
½ cup milk
1 egg (or ¼ cup fat free egg substitute)
3 tbsp canola oil
¾ cup all purpose flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
¾ cup ground flax seed
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup mashed banana (about 2 large bananas)

So here are my lovely bananas that are quite ripe.  I am very picky about eating bananas, and the minute they lose all trace of green tint, I'm no longer able to eat them.  So, most bananas end up frozen for future smoothie use or mashed into some baked good.  

 

I started with mashing the bananas, because mashing is one of my favorite kitchen activities.  

Okay, next step is to make the wet mix.  In goes the brown sugar (hey, only 1/2 cup for an entire recipe), milk, oil, and egg.  That actually looks pretty gross before it's mixed, haha.

Now, the dry ingredients.  Here is the whole wheat flour and all purpose flour below.

Now, flax seed.  I think this is one of those ingredients that gets wrongfully scorned as being a nasty health food.  Hey, what did it ever do to you?  It's delicious, it's good for you, and it gives awesome texture to breads and muffins.

So now we've combined the ground flax seed with the two flours, and added baking soda and baking powder.
 

Add the dry mix to the wet mix, and you get something that looks like this.  Looks like super granular chocolate frosting.

Now you add the banana.  

Until it looks something like this.  You just need to fold it enough so that the banana gets evenly incorporated into the batter.  Lumps of banana are okay, even encouraged.

Now, you want to put the batter into a muffin tin.  I greased the divets first using some canola oil and a pastry brush.

Haha, funny story about the word "brush".  When I was in Hong Kong doing some language testing, I was working with a superbly charismatic Kindergartener on some English vocabulary.  I showed a picture of a hairbrush and told him, "This is a 'brush.'"  The kid looked up at me with bewilderment and said, "brush?!?!?!" and just started cracking up.  He was laughing so hard he nearly fell off his 2-foot-high classroom chair.  He kept laughing and laughing, then he'd say to himself, "brush!" and start laughing all over again with his little head thrown back.  As he was leaving the session that day, he kept shaking his head back and forth, smiling and saying to himself, "brush..."   What on earth about the word could have struck him so funny?!  Hahaha anyway, I think that was one of my favorite data collection days in the history of my research life so far. 

Sorry to have gotten so off-track.  Okay, so you know how I have such trouble making things the same size?  One way to remedy this is to use an ice cream scoop like this to scoop batter into your muffin pan.  It's the perfect size, really.

Bake at 350F for 18-20 minutes, and you get this little darlings!

Deeelicious!

They are so perfectly springy too.

Okay, so once they are cool enough to handle, transfer them to a wire rack and allow to cool completely.  But.  Do yourself a favor and grab one of the warm ones and pair it with your coffee.

So yummy!  Look at the beautiful color on that muffin.  The part that surprised me is how SOFT the muffin is.  Sometimes, healthy muffins turn out a little harder than the ones that use a lot of oil and butter.  But I think the flax seed, which has some natural oils, helped to keep it really soft and moist.

Delicious!

So delicious!  It has a very light banana flavor, and the texture is wonderful.  The flax seeds give it that body that we enjoy from a good multigrain muffin, and the whole wheat flour also contributes to that heartiness.
 

Thanks for the delicious recipe, Nana!

For a printable version of this recipe, please click here. 

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