Disaster-Banana Muffins

On Shrove/Fat/Pancake Tuesday, my best friend Margi posted this tantalising recipe on her blog:

Makes 8 pancakes.

1/4 cup plain flour
1/4 cup oatbran
1/2 cup milk
1 egg
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 bananas
Nutella. 

Sift together the flour and baking powder. Add the oatbran. Whisk together the milk and egg and add to the dry material. Mix. Let sit for 5/10 minutes. Mash the bananas. Add to the mixture. Heat a lightly oiled frying pan until it's pretty hot. Use the 1/4 cup measure to drop the pancake mixture onto the pan. Cook until the mixture is bubbling. Flip over and cook until the other side is brown. Eat. Die of a foodgasm. You can spread them with nutella if you are being decadent. 

This recipe was originally from the Moosewood cookbook (well worth buying btw, excellent all round veggie and vegan cookbook.) The original was too stodgy and unhealthy for my liking to I took out the crap and substituted half the flour for oatbran. If you can't find oatbran (in the UK it's in the health food and 'free from' aisle) do 1/4 cup flour and 1/4 cup oats. If you don't have cup measures there is a conversion table here. 

Now, I *have* to make pancakes on Shrove/Fat/Pancake Tuesday. I'm not a superstitious person, but that is one tradition that is sacrosant. Tuesday nights mean dance class, so by the time I got started on these it was coming up on 11pm.

Pro tip: if, like me, you're going to use a potato masher to smoosh your bananas, use a bigger bowl.

For once, I followed the recipe to the letter. Or at least I think I did. It was late at night. I have no idea what I did wrong, but (as you may have guessed from the title of the post), it was not my finest culinary hour (although I take the BEST live action pancake flipping shots):

As you can see, this was burnt and misshapen. I think it was too runny to cook the middle before the outside burned. I have no idea. But I just couldn't bring myself to waste all the lovely batter, so I stuck what was left in some cupcake cases and popped them in the oven on a medium heat for about half an hour.

Did I mention the extremely cute cupcake cases? They were a much appreciated gift, purchased from Lakeland & Limited.

The recipe worked great as muffins, maybe a little bit overly dense but a really lovely flavour and delightfully sticky thanks to the bananas.

Flapjack-adjacent biscuit-type-things

I expect my consistent inability to provide clear descriptions or accurate quantities for my recipes is rather frustrating, but it's more than just laziness and bad record-keeping on my part: I genuinely believe that the best cooking is done by sight and flavour and texture (or sound: read this amazing article on that), with the ingredients you have to hand.

Today I needed something with sugar in it to help me through a very long day on very little sleep. After a quick sweep of my dwindling stocks, I made a batch of sweet oaty treats somewhere between biscuits and flapjacks. I didn't measure any of the ingredients or pay attention to how long they were in the oven (at least not in minutes - it was as long as it took me to get bored of Prime Minister's Questions and put on a load of laundry...).

I mixed roughly equal volumes of flour, sugar and margarine to about double that volume of porridge oats, until I got a mixture that was close to crumble topping but stickier. I then added runny honey, about the same volume as the margarine, a pinch of salt, a pinch of cinnamon, and a few drops of vanilla essence, and mixed until I achieved a doughy mixture that held its shape.

I spread it to about three-quarters-of-an-inch thickness onto baking paper on a baking tray, and baked at 200 degrees for about half an hour, which was a little bit too long. I then left it to cool quite thoroughly before cutting into squares: