Monday 13 July 2009

banana & maple syrup muffins with maple syrup frosting

I learnt something new this weekend and I wonder if people actually know that there's 'Maple Syrup' and 'Maple Flavoured Syrup'? Up till two days ago, I would've thought that both were the same thing until I had a good look at the supermarket and realised that Maple syrup was almost 5 times more expensive than Maple flavoured syrup. And well, a bit of marketing works and it was actually a wobbler on the Maple syrup bottle that caught my attention.

The Maple syrup bottle with the wobbler. Yes, I work in advertising and I still get sucked in by marketing! This was almost $10 for the bottle.
The plan for this weekend was to make the banana & maple syrup muffins with the maple syrup frosting from 'In the Kitchen'. FYI: This was actually the first two recipes I'd put a post it against when I got the book and well, it ends up being the 8th and 9th recipes that I'm cooking (it'll be awhile till I get to the 1000 or so recipes that are in this volume). 

Start by mashing the bananas and caster sugar. The mistake I made here was that the bananas just weren't ripe enough. I nearly doubled that fork over trying to mash the banana - somehow managed in the end but I urge you to wait till your bananas are ripe and browning.
Unfortunately, muffin mix doesn't look that great especially when you've got banana in it.
Into the muffin cases for baking. Again, true to its word, the recipe gave me 10 equally sized muffins.
The muffins took about 20 minutes to bake. Whilst the tray was in the oven, I got started with the Maple syrup frosting - basically 3 tbsp of maple syrup with 100g of soft cream cheese.
It doesn't look like a lot of frosting but trust me, just a little bit of frosting is enough to top the muffins.
The muffins are done!
When my uncle came over, he asked me whether I'd filled up a piping bag just to ice the 10 muffins that I made. Yes I did - he thought I went to a lot of effort just for 10 muffins but it's well worth it in the end.
Look how pretty they are! The piping isn't the best but I think these muffins with the piped icing look better than just smearing the frosting on with a knife.
I knew already that banana wasn't ripe enough and when I had a taste of one of these, you could easily taste the rawness of the banana. However, the texture of the muffin was moist as has been all the muffin recipes I've used out of this book - the maple syrup frosting went down as a treat with the muffins (gave it a sweetness which I think is just right).

There's still a few more muffin recipes yet to go in the book. I do love a good muffin and so far, the recipes just seem to get better!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yum, great idea! I'm addicted to the real stuff and I must admit I was seduced by the mapel leaf shaped bottle too a while back (although now I use a Camp Organic one but it doesn't seem as strongly flavoured as non organic).

Stephcookie said...

Mmm banana and maple sounds like a great flavour combination. I hate that raw taste that comes through with under-ripe bananas, I find if you bake them in the oven for a bit until the skins go black before you use them it helps get rid of some of that rawness.

Trisha said...

maple syrup cream cheese frosting? now that's something! mmmm i'm salivating over banana muffins with that sinful frostomg!

Betty @ The Hungry Girl said...

Oh these look really pretty. I bet I'm going to crave banana muffins/bread soon!

panda said...

nqn - i reckon i'll probably keep the bottle once i've finished with it; it is rather pretty! anyway, will keep an eye out for the Camp Organic one you use.

steph - thanks for the tip - will try it out next time i have raw bananas! actually i had a lot of frozen brown bananas in the fridge but was worried they wouldn't work for this recipe.

trisha - the maple syrup cream cheese frosting is so easy to make and just a little bit of it is enough to satisfy any craving :P

betty - my fave has to be banana bread. I find that they tend to be more moist than muffins.