Food Top Trumps #4: Hummingbird Bakery's Banana and Cinnamon Muffins

Banana and Cinnamon Muffins (with added chocolate)

What do you do with a bunch of browning slightly bruised bananas no one particularly wants to eat?

Make muffins. I have tried several banana muffin recipes. Today, for the first time, I tried making the ones in the Hummingbird Bakery book. And they are good. Especially when you take their advice of adding some chopped up chocolate to the mixture. Because doing that cannot fail to improve things, right?

The Scores:

1. Popular with my girls: 10/10. The biggest girl scored these `ten trillion'. Even with a Maths teacher as her Dad, she doesn't get that the score needs to be a number between zero and ten when marking something out of ten.

2. Easy and simple to remember: 10/10. Nothing hard about making these at all. And I am sure if I made them enough times, I'd be able to commit this recipe to memory. You could even have children helping to make them. If you wanted the process to take three times longer and result in extra mess in the kitchen, that is.

3. Made up of things usually in the cupboard that don't cost much: 10/10. As already mentioned, this was using up old bananas that were in danger of festering in the fruit bowl for a few more days before getting chucked. Nothing else used that I wouldn't normally have in. The recipe says to use buttermilk. I never buy this, as a friend recommended ages ago you can get the same effect by mixing half milk and half cheap natural yoghurt.

4. Vaguely healthy: 8/10. Okay, so I admit I added 100 grams of chocolate, and the recipe also contains butter and sugar, BUT it does use up almost 6 bananas. I made 18 decent sized muffins - if you ate three of them, that would count as one of your five a day. Good, I think, when you consider the other cake options out there.

5. Yummy to eat: 9/10. Very yummy, especially if you eat them whilst the chocolate is still warm and runny. Yum. I also really liked the crackly effect of sprinkling some sugar and cinnamon on the top of the muffins just before putting them into the oven. Very pleasing...

Bonus points for making something new - 5.

TOTAL POINTS: 52

Making this the Food Top Trump so far.

I'd love to hear from any readers who have a Food Top Trumps of their own. You know me, I am always happy to try something lovely to eat in the name of science.