domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

I’m not a vegan. I realize that a year or two back, vegan cupcakes allegedly took over the world, but that seems to have died down, and I have to admit that I never got around to trying said cupcakes. I tell you this not to establish some sort of anti-vegan bias (there isn’t one) but to explain that I was fairly suspicious about this recipe. I mean, I read Vegan Lunchbox and Vegan Dad, but neither of them talks much about baking.

So all of that, and last night I found myself with ripe bananas, a desire for banana bread, and no easily-accessible butter. I figured that I could find a recipe that used oil and then jump off from there, and that’s exactly what I did. Lucky thing, too, because these ended up being the best banana muffins (or bread–muffins were just faster) that I’ve ever made.

We ate them standing up in kitchen at ten at night. The jam, by the way, is plum jam, which was also made last night. More on that coming soon, because plum jam is *almost* as easy to make as these muffins.

Vegan Banana Muffins
3 bananas
1/4 cup applesauce
1/2 cup olive oil (because I love olive oil. You could, however, probably use whatever oil you have around.)
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 1/2 cups oat flour (Made by the very fancy method of putting rolled oats in the food processor and whirring them until they were flour) (You could probably substitute white or whole wheat flour for this.)
1 cup white flour
1/2 cup golden flaxseed (This is totally optional, and could be replaced by blueberries, chocolate chips, raisins, pecans, coconut…)
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1 tsp baking soda
juice 1/2 lemon

Preheat your oven to about 350. (This is approximate–my oven is a piece of shit that doesn’t give an accurate temperature read, nor does it seem to hold a temperature. Probably anything between 325 and 375 is fine.)

Combine all dry ingredients save for the baking soda. Mash the bananas, then carefully stir the mashed bananas, applesauce, and olive oil into the dry ingredients. Don’t mix them too much–it’ll make them tough.

Prepare your pans, either a round cake pan, a dozen regular-sized muffins (plus a bit–we baked enough dough for maybe two more muffins in a small pyrex bowl), or a loaf pan. Grease the pans, or line the muffin tray with cupcake papers.

Mix the lemon juice into the batter, and then add the baking soda and quickly mix it in. Fill the muffin cups to the top, even mounding it a little bit. If you want to be fancy, sprinkle the tops with sugar.

Pop them into the preheated oven for about twenty minutes. Again, that’s just an estimate. The nice thing, though, is that it seems like it’s fairly hard to overbake these–they’re amazingly moist, and the tops got ever so slightly crispy.

When your muffins are done, cool them for a bit, then consume. Store the muffins (if there are any left) in a cool, dry place, since like most muffins, they get very sticky after about 36 hours at room temperature (covered by cling film).