Chocolate banana muffins

Have you ever had your banana so overripe and blackened that no one in the house wouldn`t touch it? Well. I have. In fact, many times. And it felt as if I was the most horrible person on earth when I decided to threw them away as I used to consider them as "ugly and non-edible" food. Guilty!

But it`s different now. In a good way. Thanks to Nigella, again, there are good recipes in her Nigella Kitchen book that transform these bad-looking banana into something more appetizing. One of the recipes was this chocolate banana muffins. I made some changes with the original recipe, which were less banana (as I only had one left),  less sugar, and less oil. Oh, and I added choc bar.

So, speaking of bad, how bad did my banana look like?
This bad. Sad, right? I feel sad just looking at it.

No worries, though, as we`re about to do some magic here. Ready with your magic wand whisk?

Peel off the skin, put the banana in a mixing bowl, and mash it up with a whisk. If your banana is ripe enough, or overripe like mine was, mashing it up would be very very easy, although  using a whisk will probably leave a bit of texture.

Whisk in vegetable oil (I used olive oil, regular one) and few drops of vanilla oil. And love potion too, if you have it.

Beat in eggs...

...brown sugar...

...then chocolate bars broken - or torn, as they were already melting out in my hot kitchen - into small chunks.

Note 1: The original recipe calls for cocoa powder mixed with flour to be added later on, but I wanted to use the chocolate bars that had been sitting for ages in my kitchen. 

Note 2: If you omit the chocolate, you`d better add more sugar because with the amount of sugar I used here (see Ingredients), the muffin itself  doesn`t taste sweet enough. 

Fold in sifted flour and baking soda.

And spoon the mixture into muffin tin lined with parchment paper or muffin cups.
Bake for 15 mins at 200 C.

Here they are, puffing up delightfully! Not so ugly anymore, huh?
My muffins came out in irregular shapes of course. I can`t remember if I`ve ever made something neatly.

So let me show you again what the magic did. 

From this:

To this:

And you can totally smell the banana aroma coming out from these fluffy muffins filled with heavenly oozes of dark chocolate.

My husband is not big on some particular fruits and banana are one of them. He also tends to freak out whenever we had blackened banana in our house. Even so, he already ate three (three!) muffins while I am typing this. Wonderful day. 

So this is my Wednesday resolution: I will never, ever, throw away my banana, again.

Ingredients (adapted from Nigella Kitchen):

Makes for 12 muffins
1 overripe banana

100 ml olive oil

2 whole eggs

80 g brown sugar

Vanilla oil

80 g dark chocolate
200 g cake flour
1 tsp baking powder

Bake at 200 C for 15 min