Brown Butter Banana Walnut Muffins

It takes a village...to write a recipe. At least it felt that way when I was working out a new one for banana nut muffins this week. I had the basic framework in my mind, plus a couple of tweaks to make them really different. Brown sugar instead of white and browned butter in place of regular butter or oil. The browned butter has such a nice nutty flavor that I thought would tie in to my recipe perfectly.

Despite my great ideas, the first few trials fell a little flat- the final result wasn't exactly what I hoped it would be. In these types of situations, that's when I take it to my friends and family. God love all of them! They patiently put up with my requests for "objective feedback" and really do a great job of giving it to me! I was especially in need of some help as I was reaching my threshold for banana nut muffins. My co-workers suggested more brown sugar and extra vanilla, and one of Mike co-workers said of a scale of 1 to 10, the moistness is a 7. (Can't you tell they've been well-trained?) So I immediately went home and whipped up a new batch making all the proper adjustments.

A little extra brown sugar and more vanilla were easy changes to the recipe. To bump up the moisture, I thought about it for a while before swapping out the milk for sour cream. I could tell right away that these changes were exactly what my recipe needed. Although I had been pretty close to swearing off banana nuts for life, my mouth started watering when I took them out of the oven. I'm hoping that when the new batch of muffins arrive at our workplaces today, I still have some willing taste testers because I think they'll be pleased!

Yield: 18 standard size muffins

Ingredients:
1 cup chopped walnuts
2 cups flour
1 cup brown sugar
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 stick butter
2 eggs
3/4 cup sour cream
2 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 cup mashed bananas

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Line muffin pans with foil or paper liners and spray lightly.
3. Chop walnuts. Remove 2 heaping tablespoons of the walnuts and place into a separate dish. Add a pinch of cinnamon to the reserved walnuts and set aside.

4. Combine all the dry ingredients- flour, brown sugar, baking powder, salt, and the cinnamon. Set aside.
5. Brown the butter in a stainless saucepan over medium heat (only because those dark-colored nonstick pans will prevent you from seeing how much the butter has browned). Please check out chow.com for great info on how to brown butter. Cool by dipping the bottom of the pan in water and set aside.

6. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the eggs, sour cream, and vanilla.
7. Continue whisking while streaming in the brown butter.
8. Stir in the mashed bananas.
9. Add the dry ingredients and stir until only just combined. Overstirring will result in a tough muffin!
10. Fold in the walnuts.
11. Use an ice cream scoop to portion batter into liners.

12. Sprinkle the reserved walnuts over the top of each muffin.
13. Bake in a preheated oven until muffins are golden and a tester inserted into a muffin comes out clean, about 22 minutes.