Banoffee Muffins

Today I made Banoffee Muffins.  This is a variation on Banoffee Pie, which is described in Wikipedia thus:  
“Banoffee pie is an English dessert pie made from bananas, cream and toffee from boiled condensed milk (or dulce de leche), either on a pastry base or one made from crumbled biscuits and butter. “

A muffin variation is a simply delicious alternative with the lovely flavour of ripe bananas and a toffee caramel mixed in.

As the description mentions using condensed milk,boiled it seemed a good idea to follow a recipe from the Carnation website, which used Carnation’s own Caramel, where they have already done the job for you. Of course since the caramel is made from condensed milk it is already sweet, so no sugar is needed in the recipe.

This is a very simple recipe, once you have assembled the ingredients ready to make them. For mine I used cardboard muffin cups, rather than a muffin tin lined with paper cups. Now the muffin cups are larger than cases, so it was a guess as to how much they would fill as they baked, but dividing the mixture fairly evenly between them resulted in the muffins filling the cups and blooming out of the top. They looked wonderful when baked and I could hardly wait to see how they tasted. Luckily it is recommended to eat them warm, so I didn’t have to wait too long. But it is fine to let them cool and eat them, or simply pop one in the microwave oven for about 15 seconds to warm it through before eating. The taste is just delicious, and most certainly moreish. I could happily have eaten a second one almost immediately but managed to stop myself.

I heartily recommend these to anyone who likes a nice, sweet, muffin with that lovely toffee flavour with the beautiful hit of banana too and a nice crunch from pecans, if desired.

Ingredients:

• 275g self-raising flour
• Preheat the oven to 190°C (170°C for fan ovens) Gas Mark 5.
• Mix the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda in a bowl.
• In another bowl, mix the eggs, milk, oil, mashed bananas, vanilla and a dollop of the caramel. Then, mix this gently into the flour until just combined, don’t beat hard (if it looks lumpy its right!).
• Gently swirl through the rest of the caramel until rippled.
• Place muffin cases in the tin and spoon in the muffin mix.
• Top with the chopped nuts, if you like them. Bake for about 20 minutes, cool slightly then tuck in!
• aising flour
• 1tsp baking powder
• 1tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 2 medium eggs (large in USA)
• 150ml milk (I used 2%, which is semi skimmed)
• 5tbsp vegetable oil
• 2 ripe bananas, mashed (my unzipped bananas weighed 210 grams)
• 1tsp vanilla extract
• 397g can Carnation Caramel
• 55g chopped pecan nuts (optional)

Method: