Banana Butterscotch Matilda Muffins:

This is the first installment of the Nomerati series “Cooking with booze”. Whenever the mood strikes our fancy, David and I will be cooking with beers and various spirits, covering food items from baking to barbecue. We love food. We love booze. It was only a matter of time until we combined the two.

Last night we decided to make beer breads. David went the savory route, with Gruyere cheese, chives, and a saison ale. You'll have to wait to find out about his. This post is about my choice, and how hard I rocked it in the kitchen last night.

It didn't take me long to decide what I wanted to make. I have a thing for banana bread. Our relationship is very serious. I prefer it with nuts, though I will eat it without them. I also wanted to try making muffins, as opposed to David's loaf.

We arrived at the store, and gathered our various baking items. As we were walking past the baking aisle, I picked up a bag of butterscotch chips to add.

When it came to choosing the bananas, I became enamored with the smaller, red bananas that were next to the large ones. I decided to use four of those in lieu of the yellow variety. A quick wikipedia search said they were sweeter, which I though would work nicely.

Last stop was the beer. We had previously seen Well's banana bread beer, and I thought to use that, but upon searching the beer section, it had disappeared. That left me staring at the beer varieties to come up with a contingency plan.

After staring at the selection for about five minutes, I spied the Matilda bottle from Goose Island. It was larger than a regular bottle, but as David pointed out, I could always drink the rest.
My decision was made when I recalled our tasting notes on this year's Matilda batch at the Goose Island Burgers and Beer. David and I both tasted strong banana notes. Perfect!

Basic beer bread recipes vary, but commonly use 3 cups of self rising flour, a bottle of beer, and 3 tablespoons of sugar. I decided to modify this recipe on my own. I am very excited to report that I may have possibly created the best banana beer bread muffins on the entire planet. I'm not kidding. All the ingredients work together to create a shining beacon of banana bread muffin deliciousness.

Here's the final recipe:

Banana Butterscotch Matilda Muffins:

3 cups self rising flour
1 ½ teaspoons cinnamon
1 tablespoon vanilla
4 red mashed bananas
12 fluid ounces of beer
¾ cup sugar
1 cup butterscotch chips
1-1 ½ cups chopped pecans

Notes: a little more beer and flour won't really hurt. Whenever I'm in the kitchen, measurements are never exact.

I had a lot of fun mashing the bananas

I decided that a struesel topping would make it extra tasty, so I whipped that up:

Struesel topping:

1 teaspoon vanilla
½ cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon nutmeg
1 cup of pecans
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
Melt the butter in the microwave and stir well.

I baked the muffins at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes, checking on them often.

I made some naked and without struesel for quality control

I also made a small loaf, which I baked on 375 for about 40 minutes.