Muffin to See Here, I’m Just Going Bananas

Well colour me embarrassed. After going on that ridiculously long rant the other week about muffins and how ridiculous they are, we now find ourselves with another muffin post (*blush*). I have no real defence except that making those blueberry oregano muffins reminded me of an old recipe I used to like as a kid for banana chocolate chip muffins. I managed to scrounge up (and then literally dust off) the muffin recipe book that they came from (looking deliciously 80’s – why was all food photography so disgusting looking in the 80’s? Maybe that’s why there’s a bigger (no pun intended…actually yes there was 😉 ) obesity problem now. Food just looks better.), veganized the old recipe (and made a few other little changes as well ’cause I’m a rebel like that), to try and recreate the recipe that my taste buds were hankering for. They turned out even better than I remembered if I’m being perfectly honest here. Better because they’re more ethically baked? (and thus it’s all psychological and they’re not really better?), or perhaps better because I used pastry flour and not regular flour? Was it the addition of cinnamon and fresh nutmeg to the batter? Or finally (and I think this one’s likely the reason), was it because I added a little melted “butter” and a mix of cinnamon and decorating sugar to the top of these babies before baking to crispify the top a bit more? As I said before, since muffins are basically cake anyway, I don’t see a need to be skimping on sugary goodness here, you’re really fooling no one (and especially not your taste buds), if you pretend you’re having a “healthy” breakfast, so you  might as well enjoy it and go big or go home (where you will proceed to cry into your pillow because the only thing you have to eat are hard cardboardy-tasting muffins. That is  always a perfectly rational reason for producing copious amounts of tears. Also, potential side benefit to all this crying is that if you literally cry over your rock hard muffins, the moisture might make them more edible 🙂 . Alternatively, you could just make the chocolate chip banana muffin recipe that I’m providing below.)

The one downside with bananas however, especially when you buy them in the summer, is of course the ever present and rage-inducing fruit fly. Look fly, I get it. I love fruit too. I mean who doesn’t? (probably people with severe fruit allergies, but that’s not really a choice, so those people are exempt from my sweeping generalization) But seriously, back off, and get your own damn fruit. You need to work for it like everyone else and stop being such a moocher. Frankly, I can’t see why you can’t just hang out at the fruit source (aka the banana tree) and just wait for the bananas to come to you. At that point, you can banana it up to your hearts content without being either shooed away, or gleefully smooshed to death between my hands.

Is there really anything more satisfying than killing a fruit fly? (well…mosquitoes are more satisfying of course, but that’s a rant for another day). I can think of nothing else that quite captures that vengeful – yet oddly gleeful – feeling of “haha! I got you you bastard!” being swiftly followed by “ewww…dead mini fly carcass on my hands” (don’t worry, I make it a point to always rid my hands of corpse juice by washing them thoroughly before I resume baking I promise – otherwise I couldn’t “officially” call my desserts vegan anymore 🙂 ).

I always try and buy as few bananas as I can when buying them for baking purposes, but it doesn’t always work out. For instance, this time I had to buy four bananas, but I really only needed three. I left the fourth one sitting on top of my refrigerator (which gets warm because of the fridge motor or whatever), in our unairconditioned house like the Stephen Hawking/ Einstein (insert other known genius’ here) stunt double that I am. I swear it was only five seconds later that a virtual swarm (ok, it was probably really only two at this point) fruit flies zeroed in on their target and began taunting me viciously.

Let me hear you say this shit is bananas
B-A-N-A-N-A-S
(This shit is bananas)
(B-A-N-A-N-A-S)

Again
This shit is bananas
B-A-N-A-N-A-S
(This shit is bananas)
(B-A-N-A-N-A-S)

Oh Gwen Stefani, YOU clearly feel my pain.

Wow, I didn’t think I had it in me to talk about bananas for that long either. Anyone still reading right now, you deserve my sincerest words of praise for sticking it out. It’s amazing how much I can whine about something when there’s no one standing right in front of me to provide me with eye rolls, audible sighs and other visual and auditory cues to point out how ridiculous (and long winded) I’m being.

Anywho, it may not be directly their fault, but sheesh, bananas, you really do have the capacity to make me go bananas.