Lazio Explorer

It's Nutella Day! A day where you can (legitimately) stuff your face with Nutella and not feel guilty! To celebrate, along with our customary Nutella on toast breakfast, we've decided to honor the day with a sweet treat that can easily be paired with a coffee, used as a dessert, or simply for breakfast...

Banana and Nutella Muffins

This is based on a recipe we picked up from a supermarket some time ago. We end up collecting so many that we often forget about them and lose them down the back of the sofa, but this one stuck to the back of our 'baking' hive mind, probably because there's never shortage of Nutella and over-ripe bananas in our house. We've already tried it a couple of times, but this time we've tweaked the recipe based on what we had in the fridge, and surprisingly, substituting lighter ingredients with fatter ones has given much yummier results! (surprise!)

Ingredients:

300g self-raising flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
100g light brown soft sugar
50g porridge oats
2 ripe bananas
284ml buttermilk
75g olive spread, melted
2 medium eggs, beaten
100g Nutella

Three steps to heaven:

1- Preheat the oven to 356F/180C/gas mark 4 and mix together the flour, bicarbonate of soda, sugar and oats in a large bowl.

2- Mash the bananas until pureed (if they are ripe, a fork will work, if not, a whizz with a blender will do the job). Then mix in the buttermilk, olive spread and eggs. Add the banana mixture to the flour bowl and stir lightly to mix- it will look a bit lumpy, and that's good.

3-Put a spoonful of the mixture into 12 paper muffin cases, then spoon a dollop of Nutella into the middle of each one. We'll leave you to work out what a dollop is exactly. Top the muffin with the remaining mixture and pop them in the oven for around 20 minutes until they are golden.

In our version of the recipe, we have substituted the buttermilk with double cream and, to compensate for the lack of acidity of the double cream, we used baking powder instead of bicarbonate of soda (which needs an acid to activate). Finally, we have melted 75g of unsalted cooking butter instead of the olive spread.

Well, we're not experienced bakers, but these came out really nice and fluffy!

Happy Nutella day! What did you make?