Peanut Butter Banana Muffins with Mini Peanut Butter Cups

Oh man. These are as good as they sound. The mini peanut butter cups are from Trader Joe's, where I went last Friday, to get a bouquet of flowers for my super star actress friend whose show I was on my way to see, and ended up buying a whole slew of random confections because (a) Trader Joe's is dangerously cheap; and (b) I'm a sucker for packaging. A week later: these are not impulse purchases I've regretted. These are impulse purchases that have filled our home with joy.

You should totally make these. Elvis would want you to.

Peanut Butter Banana Muffins with Mini Peanut Butter Cups

Adapted from Joy the Baker

Yield: 12 muffins

1.5-2 cups mashed, super ripe bananas (about 3-4)

1/3 cup plain yogurt or sour cream

1/3 cup peanut butter (I used natural creamy unsweetened kind)

3 tablespoons butter or margarine, melted, or mild-flavored oil

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

2/3 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup ground flaxseed (flax meal)

1 1/2 cups flour (I used spelt flour, but any combination of whole wheat pastry or all-purpose flours would work)

1 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup mini peanut butter cups, or chopped regular peanut butter cups, or milk chocolate chips

Grease a muffin tin and preheat oven to 350 degrees. (Or 325 degrees if you want to use convection bake option on your oven. Check them at 15 minutes if you do this; mine were done at about 16 minutes.)

Using a wooden spoon or whisk, stir together bananas, yogurt or sour cream, peanut butter, and butter or margarine. Add eggs and stir until well-incorporated. Add the brown sugar and vanilla and stir well.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the ground flaxseed, flour, baking soda and salt. (Or, if you don't like to dirty more bowls than is absolutely necessary, you can just put all these ingredients directly into your wet mix, sprinkling them a bit to ensure even distribution without over-mixing.) Add the dry to the wet and stir just until no flour chunks remain. Gently stir in the mini peanut butter cups.

Using a 1/3 or 1/2-cup measuring cup to scoop up the batter, fill 12 muffin cups evenly. Bake for 15-20 minutes, rotating 180 degrees after about 8 minutes so that they brown evenly. Good warm but even better and more peanut buttery when they've cooled completely. They also freeze well. Just microwave them enough to thaw: 30-45 seconds seems to do the job.

Nutritional info per one muffin:

275 calories / 35 g carbohydrates / 7 g protein

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P.S. added on 3/11/10

In addition to using spelt flour rather than regular or whole wheat pastry flour and making muffins rather than a loaf, I adapted Joy the Baker's recipe by reducing the amount of sugar by a third (a cup seemed like a lot, and I once read that a certain pastry chef always reduced the sugar called for in a recipe by either a quarter or third because she felt desserts were often too sweet, which I tend to agree with, unless the dessert is fudge or candy or something that is clearly intended to be nothing other than sickeningly sweet), increasing the amounts of baking soda and salt slightly (I like a puffy, salty muffin and felt that spelt flour, a bit denser than all-purpose flour and pastry flour, would require a tad more leavening), omitting spices (I wanted the peanut butter flavor to be decidedly dominant, with no cinnamon- or clove-induced distractions), adding vanilla, and, of course, replacing 1/4 cup crushed peanuts with a whole whopping cup of mini peanut butter cups. Just listing the changes I made in case you were not sure which recipe to try and wanted a description of their differences to better inform your decision.