Cacao, PB2, Banana Muffins

By: Genevieve Melzer

I am notorious for eating green bananas, I like my bananas right as they turn from green to yellow. So I always buy them when they are green so they will be perfect to eat in a day or so, but sometimes I buy too many and as soon as they get any sort of brown spots on them I just don’t want to eat them.

I have a few recipes in my repertoire that involve brown or super ripe bananas but I wanted to make something new. I had 3 overly ripe bananas so I looked in my pantry and two ingredients jumped out at me immediately. The cacao powder and the PB2 (a peanut butter protein powder), I then realized what I was going to make… cacao, peanut butter, banana muffins.

I recently purchased PB2 and am obsessed with it; it is a peanut butter protein powder but doesn’t have any weird additives. It packs 5g of protein in 2 tablespoons and has 85% less fat calories than traditional peanut butter. I have been using it in all my protein smoothies and thought I should see what it’s like to bake with.

You will need:

3 bananas (very ripe)
3 tablespoons coconut sugar
3 tablespoons cacao powder, unsweetened (can use cocoa powder instead)
3 tablespoons of PB2, peanut butter protein powder (can use peanut butter or almond butter instead)
½ tablespoon of vanilla extract
4 tablespoons of earth balance butter
¾ cup of Gluten-Free All Purpose Flour (I used Bob’s Red Mill brand)
Pinch of sea salt

Note: The peanut butter taste is not very pronounced from the PB2, you can add more if you like.

1. Preheat the oven at 350 degrees and place muffin cup liners into muffin baking pan.
2. In a large bowl, combine banana, coconut sugar, cacao powder, PB2, vanilla extract and earth balance. Mash together until the consistency of the mixture is like that of pudding.
3. Slowly stir in the flour and add the salt. Mix together.
4. When the batter is mixed together completely scoop heaping tablespoonfuls into individual muffin cup liners.
5. This recipe should make one dozen (12 muffins) bake for 20-30 minutes, test for doneness by sticking a toothpick in the middle of one of the muffins, if it comes out clean the muffins are done.
6. Let cool for 10 minutes, serve and enjoy!

BEWARE! These muffins are yummy and once you eat one you will want to eat a few more. They are smaller than regular muffins and have only good ingredients in them so feel free to indulge yourself.

The shelf life of these muffins is around 3 or 4 days if you don’t eat them all before that. Mine only lasted two days because I was all about eating them and so was my man.