Banana Bread Muffins [Gluten-Free]

For last week's hallway dinner, we had a theme of American food. I had originally planned to try making a sweet potato pie, but as my cousin L had opted for sweet potato fries, I left the few sweet potatoes we had for her to use.

I was a tad short on time, so I fell back onto a much-baked classic: banana bread. I found to my happiness that it fit the theme perfectly. So I made one of my usual loaves of banana-topped banana breads (baked many times before). Then I settled down to make a few samples of a gluten-free version for a neighbor that can't have gluten.

Since it was only for one person, I made 1/4 of the recipe, which yielded 4 muffins. I used a precision scale (that goes to 0.01 g) to make the measurements.

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RECIPE (yields 16 cupcakes)

  Ingredients

• 3-4 ripe bananas
• 158.96 g gluten-free flour of choice (I used buckwheat flour)
• 28.4 g glutinous/sticky rice flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 cup (100 g) sugar
• pinch of salt
• 2/3 cup (146 g) oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• cinnamon, to taste
• nuts or dried fruits (optional)
• I typically use walnuts and dried figs. In this case only dried figs as I ran out of nuts.

  Procedure

1. In a mixing bowl, mash the bananas.
2. Add sugar, oil, and vanilla. Mix well
3. Fold in the dry ingredients, sifted.
4. Fold in dried fruits and nuts if using.
5. Bake at 180˚C for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
6. Cool and enjoy~

Banana Bread

Yay for banana bread! My cousin tends to buy bananas and just leave them in the fruit basket... Since we had to finish a max of food before the Spring Break, it was high time to use them!

Instead of using a large, rectangular pan, I used a loaf pan this time. Makes for a much more bread-like cake! I personally prefer it like this, so I think I will keep making banana bread in loaf pans from now on.

Here it is, fresh out of the oven. It flattened a bit after cooling.

As usual, the filling includes chopped walnuts from my uncle's garden, and some diced dried figs. The nuttiness and texture added just go so well with the cake itself.

Having slices of the banana bread is also much more presentable than the rectangles I have had in the past.

And here's a last picture, one of my favorite ones!

Recipe over this way~