The Banana Oreo Muffin Experiment

With an overwhelming desire to bake, but without the necessary tools to make the recipe I’ve been so eager to try, I did what any baker would do in such a situation: made something up!

The Banana Oreo Muffin Recipe I created was so far from the one I was hankering to try, but so good in a completely new way. I said before that I try to bake with ingredients I have on hand (while also buying the ingredients I want to bake with in advance), so I took the two things I had an abundance of: Frozen bananas and Oreos, and combined them.

          

The way these things came to be in my kitchen is a little different from the way I normally acquire ingredients, which is to say I did not buy either of them with the intention of baking with them.

The origin of the frozen bananas: Throughout the school year, my roommates and I would always buy bananas to eat and throw any leftover ones that became too ripe into the freezer to make banana bread. We made banana bread about twice last year. The rest of the bananas remained forgotten and abandoned in the depths of our freezer until one day, a friend opened the freezer looking for ice and reported back, “you guys have a bunch of black bananas in there.” He was quite disturbed.

The origin of the Oreos: After graduation, my roommates and I hosted a brunch party for our families. Because she was taking the rental car to meet a friend for coffee anyway, my mom agreed to pick up the last remaining items we needed for the party on her way back. In addition to paper plates and plastic silverware, she brought home a family size box of Oreos and handed them over without so much as a shrug for an explanation.

These ingredients came together to make a batch of really good Banana Oreo Muffins.

Banana Oreo Muffins: (Recipe adapted from http://weelicious.com)

Makes 12 muffins

I opted for this recipe because it only called for one egg, which was all I had left in my refrigerator at the time, and because I figured substituting Oreos for chocolate chips would be much easier than trying to add them to a recipe that didn’t already account for about 1 cup of additional dry ingredients.

Recipe:

• 1 ½ cups all purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp salt
• ¼ cup packed brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 2/3 cup milk
• 3 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 2 defrosted frozen bananas, mashed
• 8 crushed Oreos + 12 whole Oreos

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 400 degrees and grease muffin pan
• Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a small bowl
• In a separate bowl, whisk together brown sugar, egg, milk, oil, and mashed banana
• Add dry ingredients slowly and mix well
• Add crushed Oreos
• Line muffin pan with remaining Oreos and evenly distribute batter
• Bake about 16-18 minutes (I left mine in for 18 and they were just a little bit too brown)

In addition to testing out the marriage of Oreos and bananas, I wanted to test out different placements of whole Oreos, and put half at the bottom of the pan under the batter and half on top. After careful deliberation (and taste testing) I think I like having the Oreos on the bottom much better. They stayed crunchier and provided a nice element of surprise for unsuspecting tasters.

I didn’t consider trying to put an Oreo right in the middle of the batter

…until now.

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