Bananas Foster Muffins #MuffinMonday

Banana muffins filled and topped with a bananas Foster sauce of brown sugar, rum and pecans! These are a decadent breakfast or a handheld dessert!

We have entered the MuffinMonday Holiday Series where Anuradha from Baker Street has challenged us to not only bake some great muffins, but to kick them up a notch into FESTIVENESS.  I am all excited about this because, with the move to Dubai, I have not spent much time thinking about Thanksgiving or Christmas and I am counting on this challenge to put me in the MOOD, baby.

Our muffin recipe this week is traditional banana bread from Food Network.  So, in the spirit of festivity, I decided to make a banana muffin inspired by the New Orleans classic Bananas Foster, originally created by Chef Paul for Brennan’s Restaurant.  If you are not familiar with it, Brennan’s is the sort of restaurant where people celebrate Special Occasions (And, yes, the capitalization was deliberate!  Those kinds of Occasions, like birthdays and anniversaries, graduations and even engagements.) and Bananas Foster is their most popular dessert.  The wonderful caramelized, rum-infused banana sauce is supposed to be served over vanilla ice cream.  I have added chopped pecans and folded it through the muffin batter, then saved a little for a topping.

I am still baking in the serviced apartment kitchen here in Dubai, but the good news is that all our appliances are being delivered and installed shortly, so by the time you read this, we will be in our new home.  Then my helper can join us once more.  Regular readers will know that means the Boxer dog, who stayed behind in Cairo having a puppy sleepover with his friend, Marley, until we were in the house and his paperwork could be completed.  It's only been a few days but I miss his fuzzy face.

Beso and his buddy, Marley.

Bananas Foster Muffins

Ingredients
For the Bananas Foster sauce:
3 tablespoons or 45g butter
1/2 cup or 100g dark brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 banana
3 tablespoons rum
3/4 cup chopped pecans

For the muffin:
1 ripe banana
1 large egg
1/3 cup or 70g unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1/4 cup or 60ml milk
3/4 cup or 170g granulated sugar
1 1/2 cups or 190g all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

Method
Preheat the oven to 350°F or 180°C.   Thoroughly butter a 12-cup muffin tin.  You can use muffin liners but some of the sticky caramel banana might end up staying stuck on them when they are removed.  Which would be a doggone shame.

Cut your sauce banana in about 1/2 in or 1 cm slices.

Combine the butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon for the sauce in a flambé pan or skillet.

Place the pan on a low heat, and cook, stirring, until the brown sugar dissolves.

 Add the bananas to the pan.

Turn the heat up a little, until the melted sugar is bubbling slowly.

When the banana sections soften, carefully add the rum.  You are supposed to light the rum by tipping the pan, but I was working on an electric stove and a match did not do the trick.  Give it a try but don’t worry if your rum won’t light.

Remove from the heat and add in the chopped pecans.  Stir well.

Set aside and allow to cool slightly.

Meanwhile, mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and cinnamon for the muffin in a large bowl.

In another smaller bowl, mash the remaining banana and whisk in the egg and milk and melted butter.

Pour your wet mixture into your dry ingredients and stir gently until just mixed.  This should seem a bit dry.

Still in the pan, separate your caramel banana sauce into approximately, two-thirds and one-third.  No need to measure exactly.

Gently fold the two-thirds amount into the batter.   Divide between the prepared muffin cups.

See!  It got a lot wetter with the addition of the sauce.  It's all good. 

Top each with a share of the remaining caramel banana sauce.

Bake in the preheated oven for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Cool for about five minutes in the muffin tin and them remove to a rack to finish cooling.

These are sticky and chewy and delicious.  A right celebratory muffin.

Enjoy!

Go ahead!  Take a bite!

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Grouper with Roasted Tomatoes and Garlic Lemon Crème Fraîche

Hello from Dubai!

You know that song that goes, walking on sunshine, whoa oh?  That’s me.  Despite working on a sleep deficit, yesterday went like a dream.  We arrived in Dubai and fell into the hotel bed with time enough for just two hours of sleep before waking up to meet the real estate agent at the house for the Great Key Handover.  Lordy, mercy, there are a lot of keys for our new house!  Then the airfreight arrived and I was reunited with my Kenwood mixer.  And then the rental furniture was delivered so as soon as we buy and get a stove and refrigerator installed, we can move in!

But the best part was my trip to what will be MY GROCERY STORE.  It’s right near the house and I walked through like the bumpkin from the country just arriving in the big, bright city for the first time.  It is part of the Géant chain, which has ties to the hypermarket Casino in France and is gorgeously laid out with most everything a person could hope to want.  The first thing I spied were some baby tomatoes on the vine and my brain said, “Roast them and set them on top of something like fish or chicken.”  So I went off in search of fresh fish and found some lovely grouper filets.  At which point my brain said, “You need crème fraîche and lemons and garlic.”  And low and behold, all those things could be mine.  I rounded off the menu with some rocket or arugula tossed in a simple lemon vinaigrette.   I am cooking in the small kitchen in my hotel apartment so the photos aren’t the best, but this was one delicious and easy meal.

Ingredients
Small piece of fresh lemon
1 clove garlic
Olive oil
2 heaping tablespoons crème fraîche or mild sour cream
1 branch on-the-vine tomatoes per every two fish filets
1 Grouper or other white fish filet per person
Flakey sea salt  (I use Maldon’s.)
Crushed red pepper
Black pepper (I didn’t have any but you should definitely use some.)

Method
Preheat your oven to 400°F or 200°C.

Finely mince your garlic and put it in a small bowl with the crème fraîche and a healthy pinch of salt.

Cut the end off of the lemon and squeeze the juice into the garlic/crème fraîche bowl.

Add just a little olive oil, perhaps a half a teaspoon, and give it a good stir.  Refrigerate until needed.

Cut your leftover lemon peel into thin slices.

Put the tomatoes in a heatproof dish that will be big enough for your fish filets later.  Drizzle with olive oil and then sprinkle with salt and crushed red pepper.  Top with the slices of lemon peel.

Roast the tomatoes in the preheated oven for about 10-15 minutes.

Meanwhile, season both sides of your fish filets with salt and black pepper (if you are fortunate enough to have remembered to buy some) and drizzle them with olive oil.

Remove the tomatoes from the oven and carefully transfer them to another dish.

Place the fish filets in the baking dish and top with the tomatoes.

Put it back in the oven and bake until the fish is opaque and cooked through, about 10-15 minutes depending on the thickness of your filets.

Serve each filet with half of the tomatoes and a generous dollop of the garlic lemon crème fraîche.  If you’d like, a side green salad rounds out the meal.

Enjoy!

Gorgonzola Pepperoni Pizza Muffins #MuffinMonday

As I write this and schedule it to post on Monday morning, the moving company folks have just called it a day for day one of Pack Out Cairo.  We have two more days of packing up and then on Tuesday, the 40-foot-high-top container will arrive and they will attempt to make all the boxes fit into that sucker.  Always a nail-biter but I am feeling good this time.  I have bought just a couple of things since we moved to Cairo and they aren’t big.  And I have given some stuff away.  And we came 11 months ago with the same size container.  So: feeling pretty good.  Also feeling pretty good about Muffin Monday this week!  Finally, a savory muffin!  Anuradha didn’t tie us down to one recipe, just an ingredient: Cheese.  Well, you know I am all over that!  So I had a rake through the freezer and the cheese drawer (You don’t have a cheese drawer in your refrigerator?  Well, why the heck not?  I am flexible on what can go in there and, so, there is actually a baloney from Bologna there too.  And some beef salami.) and came up with some gorgonzola, pepperoni and a bag of frozen homemade pizza sauce.  Oh, yeah!  But you knew that from the title already, didn’t you?  As they say in Malaysia, you so smart.   Make this muffin.  You even smarter.

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups or 190g flour
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
3/4 cup or 180ml milk
1 egg
1/4 cup or 60ml canola oil
1 cup or 240ml pizza sauce, divide into 1/2 cup or 120ml for muffin and balance for topping
100g Gorgonzola (And other strong cheese can be used as well.)
50g pepperoni

Method
Preheat your oven to 375°F or 190°C and generously grease your muffin tin or use paper liners.

Cut your pepperoni into pieces and grate or cut your cheese into chunks.  My Gorgonzola had been in the freezer so, as you can see, it crumbled when I tried to cut it.   If you would like, reserve 12 small pieces of the pepperoni to put on top of the batter before baking.

In a large bowl, mix together your flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, crushed red pepper and dried oregano.

Add the cut pepperoni to the flour mixture and use your hands to separate the little pieces from each other.

In a separate bowl, whisk the egg, milk, and oil together.

Add your wet ingredients to your dry and mix just until it is just combined.

Gently fold in half of the pizza sauce and all of the Gorgonzola cheese.  It's NOT pretty but don't let that put you off.  It will be delicious.

Spoon the batter into your prepared muffin tin.

Divide the remaining pizza sauce between the muffin cups.  Top with a little piece of pepperoni, if saved.

Bake in your preheated oven for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Allow the muffins to cool for a few minutes then remove from the muffin pan and cool on a rack.

Enjoy!