This banana oatmeal muffins recipe is tasted and full of good nutrition!
Banana Oat Muffins
In honor of the blog’s one year anniversary, I wanted to make some sweets, but I thought it should be relevant to the blog, so what better idea than to turn oatmeal into muffins! In reality, this is modified from a banana-nut bread recipe from Alton Brown’s book, but I was able to make it a little healthier and I think it works well!
Banana Oat Muffin Recipe
Makes 1 dozen muffins (or one 9×5 loaf for banana bread), ~250cals each. You’ll need a muffin tin or silicone cups.
- 12oz bananas (about 3.5 medium bananas, as ripe as possible, almost brown bananas are great!)
- 1C granulated sugar
- 5.4oz WW pastry flour (a hefty 1C)
- 3.6oz oat flour (1C rolled oats, see below)
- 1t baking soda
- 1t kosher salt
- 3oz unsalted butter (3T)
- 2 eggs at room temperature
- 1t flavored vanilla extract
- 1C crushed nuts (walnuts, pecans, almonds, whatever)
How to make them
Step 1: preheat oven
Begin by preheating the oven to 350 degrees.
Step 2: Melt the butter
Next, to prepare for later, put the butter in a small bowl and melt it in the microwave. Make sure to do this on a low temperature so you don’t boil off too much water.
Step 3: Mash the ripe bananas
In a medium bowl, place the bananas and sugar together and mash until smooth. I think a whisk works well here. Feel free to leave a few small banana pieces if you like your muffins chunky.
Step 4: Mix the flour
In another bowl, mix your whole wheat pastry flour (feel free to substitute any kind of flour here, including gluten free) along with the oat flour, baking soda, and salt. Give them a good stir to evenly distribute. If you’re like me and don’t have oat flour, you can make some out of rolled oats! I used our coffee grinder to pulverize them into a fine powder.
Step 5: Add eggs and vanilla to the butter
Once you have all the dry ingredients together (flour, oats, etc), get the bowl with the melted butter. Hopefully it’s relatively cool by now. Add the eggs and flavored extract and beat until combined.
Before mixing everything, don’t forget to prep your cooking vessel. I went with a solid coating of butter spray. Here’s everything set to mix:
Step 6: Mix batter
Then, add the butter/eggs mixture to the mashed bananas, and stir until combined. Pour this wet mix on top of the dry ingredients, and fold in using a spatula. The goal with any muffin recipe is to NOT develop any gluten while mixing. Just flip the ingredients over itself, and once combined (maybe 12 folds?), it’s time to add the nuts. Again, just fold them in until evenly distributed, and then it’s time to portion them out!
Step 7: Spoon into a muffin pan.
Use a .25C measuring cup to pour the muffins out evenly. I found that it really comes out to a little more than .25C per muffin. If you want, sprinkle a few flax seeds on top in honor of Kath! (I obviously halved the recipe).
Step 8: Bake for 25 minutes
Place in the oven in a middle rack and bake for 25 minutes, or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean. Delicious!
frequently asked questions:
If you’d like to mix in chocolate chips too, you totally can!
Make these gluten free by using a gluten free flour and gluten free oats.
You can make this into a banana bread loaf in a loaf pan. Cooking time will be slightly longer.