Banana Muffins (from a cake mix)

So what do you do when you have new silicone bakeware and 3 "soon-to-be-overripe" bananas? You make banana muffins.

I had the option of looking up a recipe for banana bread and measuring ingredients and such or I could just find a cake mix in the cupboard that was pretty neutral towards banana and use that. I chose the latter. Cake mixes just make things so much easier to not mess up and for the most part, measurements aren't all that necessary.

I started by pre-heating my oven to 350 degrees and lined up the new bakeware on some cookie sheets. The big 9x9" probably wouldn't need to be put on a baking sheet but it makes it easier to move into and out of the oven. I peeled the 3 bananas and put them in the mixing bowl. While those were being mixed into a mush, I chopped about a cup worth of walnuts. To the mashed bananas I added 3 eggs and maybe a 1/4 cup of oil (I just poured a little bit into the bowl). I then added the whole bag of cake mix and about a cup of water to bowl a little at a time letting them mix in before adding more. The consistency looked right once everything was combined so I let the mixer run for a couple minutes then added the chopped walnuts and just stirred those in.

The batter was spooned into the mini-muffin pans and the bigger muffin cups and the left over went into the square pan. They all went into the oven and baked for about 20 minutes (the mini-muffins came out earlier than the rest).

The muffins came out very moist and had a lot of banana flavor. The mini-muffins turned out to be a lot like those Hostess Mini-Muffins, but much more natural tasting.

For something that I whipped up really quickly and on a whim these turned out really well. And unlike the lasagna, most of these came to work with me today so I won't be eating them for the next week.