Banana chocolate hazelnut muffins

So I decided to play around a little with some muffins. I had seen a recipe for muffins using Nutella but of course I couldn't find it again when I was looking. That meant I was left to my own devices so I made something up. lol Oh, and I didn't have any Nutella......my son prefers the Jiff version of chocolate hazelnut spread.

This is the end product....

I decided to make a banana version.

I got my basic banana muffin recipe made. (You can find the recipe at the bottom of the post.) Also, I used agave nectar instead of sugar to keep more moisture in the muffins. I find that when I make banana muffins they tend to be drier than I want so I use the agave instead. Of course, I could always just add a little more milk.....that would work. If you don't want to use the agave, of course you can use regular sugar. It's the same amount, and you might want to add in a splash of milk so that the batter isn't quite so thick.

So, back to the making stuff.

After I got my recipe all made, I just dumped some of the chocolate hazelnut spread into my bowl. It looked like this..........

I just folded it in so that my batter (and later my muffins) would have swirls of the hazelnut spread.

Then I put the batter in the muffin pan, put it in the oven and waited 20 minutes.

And that's it. Yummy muffins for breakfast!

Here's the recipe.


Banana Chocolate Hazelnut Muffins

1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

1 egg beaten

1/3 cup agave nectar

½ cup milk

¼ cup oil

½ cup mashed banana

½ cup chocolate hazelnut spread

 

 

Preheat oven to 350F.

 

Grease 12 muffin cups or use paper muffin cup liners. Mix the flour, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl and set aside. In a medium sized bowl, combine beaten egg, agave nectar, milk, oil, and mashed banana. Add to the flour mixture and combine well, but do not over stir. Gently fold in the chocolate hazelnut spread leaving a swirl effect to the batter. (To be perfectly honest here, I did not measure the chocolate hazelnut spread. I just glopped a bunch out into my bowl until I thought it looked like enough.)

 

Fill the muffin cups 2/3 full and bake for 20 minutes or until set.

Let me know if you try them and what you think!

Mmmmm.........muffins........

We have a client that is an older lady and she likes to shell pecans when they're in season. So at Christmas time she told her kids that she wanted pecans to shell. Well, they came through with about 300 pounds of pecans for her. Then, she also knows another man that owns and orchard and dropped by out of the blue one day and brought her another 300 pounds!! So, she's been giving pecans to everyone that she can.

I just happened to stop by to pick up her paperwork in the midst of all of this and was the happy recipient of a couple of bags of shelled pecans. And they're really good too.

So, I've been making goodies with pecans in them. We don't generally like pecans in our breads or cookies so I've been looking for things that revolve around the pecans. I came across this recipe for Pecan Pie Muffins at The Girl Who Ate Everything.

They were really good!! To be honest, I don't really care much for pecan pie (I know! I know! My mother wonders how I can be both a southern girl and her daughter.) but I really liked these. They're gooey and decadent and just all around good.

Not a refashion!

I know that I've mostly had shirts that I've refashioned lately, so I thought I would prove that I really can do something different. lol


I made these muffins the other morning.

They're donut muffins.


How can you go wrong with muffins that use donut dough?


The kids loved them.


I got the recipe at the Hillbilly Housewife site. She's got some really great recipes there. You should go check it out.


It's raining here today. I should be at home, snuggled on the couch, working on something fun. I say snuggled because I'm always cold when it's raining. It really doesn't matter that it's probably in the 80's outside, I'm still cold. I wore jeans today with a 3/4 sleeve length sweater. That makes me a little closer to crazy doesn't it?

Something good

I have been crafting but nothing new completed. I've been at the office from early in the morning until late at night so that doesn't leave much time for me to craft. With all the computer issues I've been having I'll be thrilled to get this month and the W-2's and 1099's behind me. I'd much prefer to lock myself in my 'studio' (sounds so much more impressive than 'the room where all my crap gets tossed') for a week and hope that nobody even contacts me. lol


Anyway, back to what I was posting about in the first place.


I made these this morning:





They're the easiest pumpkin muffins EVER. I just used a box of spice cake mix and a can of pumpkin. Mix together and bake according to the cake mix. That's it. It's just that easy. They taste really good and they're super moist.


Give 'em a try.