I have this very easy recipe I use for banana bread, except I add walnuts to it. I would love to make this as muffins, but I’m not sure if you can just put the same batter into muffin tins and make muffins, or if you have to modify the recipe somehow. I know the baking time will be shorter because of the size of each loaf, but beyond that, do I need to do anything to the recipe to convert it to a muffin recipe?
Thanks.
That recipe is very very close to the one I typically use. It is unusual in that it doesn’t have as much fat as you would expect in a quick bread (mine has even less as it doesn’t include the butter). The fact that the butter is melted here results in a dense, chewy texture. There’s no reason you can’t bake the batter in muffin tins, mind you – but it’s not the texture people might expect from a muffin.
If you’re looking for something that would result in a finer, more cake-like texture, look for a banana bread recipe that starts with creaming butter and sugar together.
To me, the texture is great on the bread. It is denser than the average muffin, but as you pointed out, it doesn’t have a lot of added fats in it, so I bet it’s not as fattening as your average muffin.
I guess my main question is, would this recipe make muffins with a puffy top, or would they be sort of flattish? When I make the bread, it does puff up a decent amount, so maybe it would be OK. I guess what I want is single serving little breads, appropriate for a breakfast, which is basically a muffin.
They will be exactly like the bread is when cooked in a loaf pan, only smaller. What makes a muffin “puffy” is the particular mix of ingredients and mixing technique, not the size/shape of the pan.
Yes, I realize that. However, how much an entire loaf puffs up v. how much a very small amount of batter might puff up is hard to gauge, to me. Muffins tend to have tops that are as big or bigger than the part that’s actually in the pan. I don’t think the banana bread recipe puffs up THAT much. Might be OK anyway, though very small, so you’d have to eat 2-3 of them to equal one store bought sized muffin.
If the ingredients and mixing technique aren’t any different, the rising (puffing) won’t be any different. The reason that some muffins are small and some explode over the edge of the cup has to do with how much batter is put into the cup to begin with. If I use my favorite standard blueberry muffin recipe, I can use the traditional guideline for filling the cups, which is 1/2 full, to get what used to be a standard size muffin. If I wanted a muffin that domes really high and extends past the edge of the cup, then I would fill it 3/4 to completely full.