The Modern Baker Challenge

Another new challenge I’m participating in – The Modern Baker Challenge. Like the BBA Challenge, we are going to bake our way through an entire book: Nick Malgieri’s The Modern Baker. But unlike the BBA Challenge, fellow bakers can “claim” certain recipes and blog about them, and are then featured on the challenge website. This means, we don’t have to tackle all the recipes, but only the ones we like. But all 150 recipes will be baked by the group. My claim for the first section of the book (quick breads): cocoa banana muffins. I’ll also bake some other breads from this section, but this is my official submission for the challenge.

For this recipe, you have to make sure that you have very ripe bananas. As Nick Malgieri puts it:

“If the bananas are not ripe enough, these will taste no better than cocoa potato muffins.”

I hate ripe bananas, so we usually don’t have any at home. So I put 3 bananas on the counter to ripen for like 3 days. The day I wanted to bake the muffins, only 2 were left. Aaaahhhh… We have tons of bananas in the house, why did the hubby take the overripe one? He doesn’t even like them! Do I really have to put notes à la “Don’t eat me” on the things that I need for baking or cooking? I guess, it will become even worse once the kids are older and help themselves with snacks.

Anyway, this recipe was really easy-peasy. It’s a quick bread, after all. You mix flour, Dutch cocoa, baking soda, salt, bananas, sour cream, butter, sugar and eggs, and pour the batter into the muffin pans. According to the book, this recipe makes 16 muffins, but I made 18 (I have a 12- and a 6-cavity muffin tin) and still had some batter left.

On a side note: I really cherish my 6-cavity muffin tin. I brought this back from my study abroad year in upstate NY at a time where muffins were not really popular in Germany yet (OMG, was it really 11 years ago that I left the U.S.?). Thus, it was virtually impossible to get muffin tins here. Now, of course, you can buy them EVERYWHERE. But my American muffin tin is really special because it always reminds me of a wonderful year abroad.

To cut a long story short: these muffins are AMAZING and will be made often from now on. They are fluffy, moist, not too sweet and really chocolaty! The kids coudn’t stop eating them. Me neither .

So, buy the book and join us. It’ll be fun!