Valentines Treats

Earlier, I was staring down some overripe bananas on my kitchen counter this week.  No matter how good we are at eating our bananas, there always seems to be a few extra that get too brown too quickly.  "Ahh, time to make banana bread again," I thought.  "NO, banana muffins sounds better.  Or what about strawberry banana muffins?"  I set about making up a recipe, and these mini muffins turned out so moist and delicious that I am going to have to make more for tomorrow morning.  

You need:

1 1/2 cups flour

1/3 cup sugar

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 large mashed bananas

1 large egg

1/2 stick butter (melted)

1/4 cup strawberry yogurt

2 tsp vanilla extract

1/4 cup milk

To Make:

1.  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Spray mini muffin tin with cooking spray. 

2.  Combine all dry ingredients in a bowl and mix with a fork.

3.  With the mixer, combine all other ingredients (bananas, egg, melted butter, yogurt, vanilla extract,  and milk).  Beat until well blended.  

4.  Add in the dry ingredients and blend in on low speed.

5.  Put a tablespoon of batter in each muffin cup and bake for about 20 minutes.

I think this probably makes about three dozen mini muffins.  I used my 2 dozen mini muffin pan and then put the rest of the batter in my Williams Sonoma X's and O's pan (like muffins in the shapes of X's and O's).  

Also, today we were baking mini cupcakes for Valentines' Day (apparently we are on a mini kick!) and I decided to try something new for the frosting.  I flavored it with Koolaid!  I let the kids choose their favorite flavors - Gabi chose lemon-lime and David chose cherry. (ok, so the cupcakes look a little more Christmasy than Valentiney)  Basically you just add unsweetened Koolaid packets to a regular batch of buttercream frosting. (or if you're not a frosting purist, you can add it to canned frosting.)  My advice would be to add a little of the packet to the frosting at a time as you go and taste test it.  The first batch we made was the cherry flavor.  I actually was only doing a half-batch (2 cups powdered sugar, 1/4 cup butter), but I added the whole packet of cherry flavor.  That icing is intense!  The kids of course loved the Pepto Bismol-like color and the crazy flavor.  So the lemon-lime batch I made with about only half a packet.  This is pretty sour stuff, folks!  We topped the green cupcakes off with Nerds for a totally kid friendly treat.  Because they are so BRIGHT! and so FULL of flavor, I am not tempted to keep eating them throughout the day.

I think I will use this method for David's birthday cake in April.  He has already informed me that he wants a dinosaur cake, and the colors and flavors of this frosting would be perfect!

Happy Friday the 13th!