Is it just me or are you ever not super inclined to finish the rest of your perfectly good bananas so that in a couple days you can say--”Oh shucks! Those bananas just have too many brown spots. I guess we better make banana bread….for the third time this month!” We love making banana bread around here. It is a treat that everyone loves and I love how our favorite recipe turns out fantastic each and every time. It is pretty foolproof.

That being said, it can be quite exciting to mix things up from the usual and venture into mixing up the flavor of your banana bread. You can always add chocolate chips, which is always a great idea. I also love mixing in crushed walnuts and/or raisins.

Today we wanted to venture head first into the banana muffin world and it ended up being one of those super fun, slow summer mornings with lots of bonding time--dancing, singing, laughing and baking together in the kitchen. My ten year old daughter is already a whiz at baking and can whip up tons of tasty desserts without a second thought. My seven year old son showed some real interest in wanting to try his hand at baking these on his own. And of course whatever big brother wants to do, my little blonde, curly-headed four year old cutie wants to do too! So we all took turns and had a great time.

Recently I wrote an article here of a few things you could add to your summer baking list with kids and we are already knocking some of those out and having so much fun with it! We already made popcorn in the brown paper bag, which totally works, by the way! (However, one recipe said to add the butter right in the bag before it cooks and I wouldn’t really recommend that tip at all.  The butter just melts right on the bag and none of it even makes it on the popcorn, so you are just left with a very greasy brown bag and unflavored popcorn. Just add your melted butter after it’s popped, as per usual--don’t fall for this idea like did ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

Now, this morning my favorite part of making the muffins together was actually a little science experiment we did to explain how and why we measure flour the way we do. It really made me appreciate the recipes that actually specify in grams how much flour to add to a recipe. I absolutely love how science-based baking is--it has always fascinated me so I love taking the opportunity to teach my kids all about it any chance I get. This morning, we experimented with the flour by weighing our cup after PACKING the flour in and after scooping in fluffy scoops of flour with a spoon and leveling out. I was actually blown away by the results. By scooping and leveling off, the cup of flour weighed 206 grams. By packing the flour in, the cup of flour weighed 257 grams! It was a difference of 50 grams!! Can you imagine what a difference that would have made in our fluffy banana muffins if we would have added 50 extra grams of flour?! (Naturally, I was even more dramatic than this when learning this with the kids ha! They will never forget this lesson :) )

Anyway, after getting a proper amount of flour, we went on to baking Natasha’s Kitchen’s fantastic recipe for chocolate chip banana muffins and I highly recommend you try this great recipe next time you have three overripe bananas. Just make sure you scoop and level off, of course! ;)

Add Recipe to Cook'n