Homemade Christmas Banana Bread Muffins - Ho Ho Ho!

Happy holidays

Although the Christmas holidays aren't quite here yet, here in our region in Spain we have an extra 5 day holiday right now because of "Dia de la constitucion" which is today and on Friday there's another bank holiday so the kids only went to school on Monday and Tuesday and are now enjoying 5 whole days without school. Perfect to do some Christmas baking and crafting together!

Banana bread turned into muffins

The first thing that I wanted to do together was bake a banana bread because I had 5 bananas ready to be consumed and an oven waiting for me to try out baking. It's always a surprise when you use another oven if things work out as well as they did with the previous one. I remember my first banana bread in the previous home failing badly because it wasn't such a powerful oven. This time I decided to play it more safe and make banana bread muffins instead, less room for error and this way I could also decorate them with some cool Christmas decoration.

The ingredients

For this recipe I used the banana bread recipe I always use, with the difference that I divided the batter into a muffin tin over a normal baking tin.

• 125 grams of melted butter (I use 82% unsalted butter)
• 200 grams of sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 50 ml of milk
• A bit of vanilla extract
• 250 grams of flour
• A teaspoon of baking soda
• A pinch of salt
• 2 big bananas mashed
• Cinnamon (yum!)

The process

Making this batter is as easy as one two three, you'll see:

First, melt the butter in the microwave. This is of course, unless it's bloody hot where you live, in summer I just leave the butter out of the fridge overnight. Right now, I need to melt it carefully, make sure you keep your eye on the microwave as it can't start boiling.

Add this to the sugar and mix it well until smooth. Now add the eggs one by one until fully incorporated into the mix.

Now add the milk as well as vanilla extract to this mix and mix until smooth again.

Add the flour, baking soda and salt at once until your batter is nice and smooth.

Last, mix in the mashed bananas and cinnamon. Your batter is ready!

Let's bake!

I used some cool Christmas cupcake forms inside a muffin tin to make sure the forms stay nice and round while baking.

They add to the holly-jolly-ness don't they?

I wasn't sure if I had to fill them up half or more as it's a different batter than cake batter but let's see which turn out best.

I preheated the oven at 190 degrees Celsius.

Although I read they were supposed to bake for 25-35 minutes, they were done after 20 minutes.

I let them cool off for a bit in the baking tin first before removing them to the cooling rack:

I then added the final batter to 6 more forms and put those in the oven too while the first batch was on the cooling rack.

When these were ready after another 20 minutes of baking, it was time to taste the ones from the first batch:

This one is cut in half and as you can see, they came out perfectly. Nice and soft, and delicious!

Final step: decorate them with cool Christmas figures for extra holiday spirit.

I placed some in the freezer after they cooled down as they are ideal for school lunches. I used to make a banana bread loaf and cut it into slices, packing them per slice in the freezer for school days but I think I will swap to this from now on as it's much faster and easier to pack as well.

The next batch has to be with cocoa, I normally do a bit of both but for some reason, it seems the cocoa didn't move with us, which is strange but I will have to get a new pack tomorrow first.

I Ho-ho-hope you enjoyed this post, if so let me know in the comment section.. Have a great day!

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