Overly Ripen Bananas? Try this Vegan Chocolate Banana Walnut Muffin Instead

Yep. This is my first time creating a vegan based muffin; thanks to the discovery of overly ripe bananas and a 6 months shelf life left cake mix stored in the drawer!

It was fun and required some detailed research before the experiment can begin; especially when I was using a non vegan recipe that works well with cake mix.

Another great helper to make this experimental recipe a success, is from the Calculator site when converting between cups and grams with specific ingredients.

Because cake mixes already have sugar content by default, and with over ripe bananas, it will be undeniably overly sweet. So the best solution is to lessen the sweetness from the cake mix by mixing plain flour or self-raising flour. I have tried (cake mix) 80%:20% (self-raising flour) mix, but it still turned out very sweet to the point I had to add something bitter like instant (I used decaf) coffee into the mix.

Therefore I would have suggested if you want to try this yourself, 70%:30% or 60%:40% ration for even less sweetness from the premix and natural sweetness from the banana.

Prepping your ingredients before the main event is always very important, this is to ensure that you will not miss out any ingredients along the way. Just so happened I had almond milk with me and some rapeseed oil left, which made this entire exercise a full vegan (vegetarian) recipe.

Other useful tips

While sifting through the flour it is always good to mix the both flour together for a more even coated finer flour, because no matter how fine it looks, there will always be lumps in the mix.

Another good idea is that when your cake mix is near expiry, the "self raising" capabilities might not be as effective, therefore adding a bit of baking soda / baking powder will help boost while baking.

Another pro-baking tips I learned from the site and from friends, is that you will need to coat your chunks with flour so that they will not sink to the bottom while baking. That's why I used extra 2 tablespoon of flour to coat the chocolate chip broken chunks and mix them well.

Sift through excess flour...

And you can repeat the step with the same flour for the crushed walnuts.

Before all mixture of the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients are combined into a smooth batter will be ready for baking; do remember to set it to 200 C / 392 F pre-heating the oven for 10 minutes. This saves time from waiting.

So all you need to do is to wait for it to bake for 20 minutes, occasionally check on it because different oven might have different temperature temperament. I have to add another 10 minutes under 160 C (320 F) because of the moist of the banana and the chocolate chips.

Even though it was the first try, it still turned out wonderful; although my parents are not used to dense moist muffins. Nevertheless, they still enjoyed, particularly with black coffee and green tea!

Time for the ingredients!

Dry Ingredients

345g cake mix , 87g self raising flour / plain flour
1 teaspoon of baking soda (particularly you are using near expiring cake mix / plain flour mix)

1 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup walnuts
1/4 cup pumpkin seeds (Optional: to increase crunch and lessen the sweetness)
2 tablespoon of flour (for mixing the chocolate chips and walnuts to prevent sinking)

Wet Ingredients

3 large very ripe bananas

72g Rapeseed oil / 1/3 cup (You can try with canola oil too)
166g Un-sweeten Almond milk 2/3 cup (you can also opt for water)

And you can watch the entire process here with my YouTube link. Please feel free to give it a thumbs up if you liked the compilation.

What do you think?

Would you give this cake mix hack a try the vegan way, or you would prefer the good old fashion way for muffins?

Feel free to share your experience here if you too have tried this before!