On the very last day of my semester in London, literally on the train on the way to the airport, I sat surrounded by my overly-stuffed bright red luggage set and ate the muffin I had picked up on a final trip to Sainsbury the night before. It turned out the muffin was banoffee flavored and was maybe the best muffin I have ever had. Top five at least anyway. “What is banoffee?” you may ask. Well, American friend, it's a combination of banana and toffee and usually refers to banoffee pie. You may recall the scene from Love Actually (which you will if you have seen it as many times as I have) in which Kiera Knightly shows up at the apartment of that guy who is in love with her and offers him banoffee pie because she thinks he hates her. Pre-semester in London, I think I just glossed over that line in the movie without having any idea what she was talking about. Post-semester in London I finally realized what she was talking about.
For one reason or another, I've been thinking about banoffee pie lately and looked up the recipe thinking it'd be fun to make. And fun to eat. As it turns out, banoffee pie contains a large amount of condensed milk. I'm not at all sure I can digest small amounts of condensed milk, much less the 21 ounces called for in the traditional recipe, so I decided to attempt muffins inspired by the pie instead. The recipe I decided to use doesn't have any condensed milk and (BONUS) calls for little bits of Heath Bar and miniature chocolate chips to be sprinkled on top.
Side story - While living in London, from time to time my flatmates and I would want to make chocolate chip cookies. The only thing was, none of the grocery stores seemed to carry chocolate chips. And I mean, we checked multiple Tescos and Sainsburys. Not even the lovely Waitrose came through for us. So instead we bought chocolate bars and chopped them up into chips ourselves, but it was super weird nonetheless. None of these stores sold pre-made cookie dough either. Waitrose did, however, sell a box of chocolate chip cookie mix that you just added water to. I know, it sounds disgusting, but if you ate them right after you made them, they were pretty damn good. And did I mention there was NO pre-made cookie dough!! It was desperate times.
Side story to the side story - About halfway through the semester, my flatmates and I all discovered that we all practiced the same small bit of deception in public. If we bumped into someone in the grocery store or accidentally got in someone's way on the sidewalk, we would each blurt out a small "Sorry!" with a British accent. Each of us started doing this independently without consulting each other. It's not like any of us ever faked a British accent to any extent, but for some reason each of us independently decided that trying to hide our blatant Americanness and just blend in while shopping for arugula (oh, sorry, rocket) seemed like the right thing to do. Jack Donaghy would have been ashamed of us.
Back to the muffins… After some internet cruising, I settled on this banoffee muffin recipe. Mashing up the bananas for the batter was probably the weirdest part. It was about what I imagine making your own organic baby food would be like. Except that my bananas were not organic. I chose metallic flats from Banana Republic this month over springing for organic bananas.
Chopping up the Heath Bar into bits was also fun.
I liked that the recipe contained Greek yogurt too.
The muffins turned out absolutely amazing.
Seriously, I don’t think I can adequately convey the deliciousness. Feel free to stop by Adams Morgan and pick one up if you want. Lord knows I'll probably be home.
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