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Scotch, Raisin, & Banana Muffins with Oatmeal-Pecan Crumble Topping

3 C cut up ripe bananas
1/2 tsp ground Ginger
pinch of ground Clove
2 TBL butter
2 TBL corn oil
1 TBL Scotch
1/2 Sugar (regular white cane sugar)
2 Eggs
1 1/2 C All Purpose Flour
2 tsp Baking Powder
1/4 tsp Baking Soda
2 TBL Cinnamon
1/3 C raisins

1/4 C Rolled Oats
1/3 C Pecans
1 TBL oil+butter+sugar mixture (remaining in the bowl)
pinch of salt

There are more elegant ways to do this, without using as many vessels, but this is how I made these muffins today. I had a hankering for some morning baked goods. These were the ingredients on hand. The bananas were frozen; when they get too ripe to eat, I save them in the freezer for banana bread, and experience has taught me that cutting them up first makes them thaw out faster, which makes them easier to use. Because they were frozen, I popped the icy lump of them into a small saucepan, covered them, and put the flame on very low. In about 5 minutes, they were steaming enough to break apart. I stirred them (this consisted of me giving the saucepan a shake every now and again) until they were warm, not hot. Remove from heat. This is very important because if the wet ingredients are hot, they will make scrambled eggs out of your eggs. Yuck. Add the ginger & clove at any point.

I preheated the oven to 350 F. In my steel mixing bowl, I put the butter and oil and popped that into the oven while it was warming, to melt the butter. Now, the bowl will be hot even before the butter melts completely, so remove the bowl from the oven once the butter looks soft. Stir the butter and oil together. Why oil? Using oil cuts down on the cholesterol (and cost), and corn oil adds another sweet flavor into the medley. Stir in the sugar. In this case, I specifically cut down the amount of sugar from my usual recipe because I wanted to use the white sugar I had on hand. (Otherwise, I would use 3/4 C honey or loose brown sugar.)

Pour the butter+oil+sugar mixture into the bananas. Leave about 1 TBL in the bowl for the crumble topping. Add bourbon into the banana, etc. mixture.

Toss the oats and pecans together in the steel bowl that has the remaining sugar mixture until you have a nicely coated crumble. Scrape into a dish and set aside.

Move the saucepan mixture into the bowl. Wisk the eggs separatedly and fold into the mixture.  Add the flour in a half cup at a time, alternating with the remaining ingredients: flour, then powder, soda, and cinnamon; flour, then raisins; finish with flour. You want to mix the raisins into the flour because this helps them grab their place in the batter and stay distributed. Like the cinnamon it also distributes the flavors throughout better than mixing all the flavors into the wet ingredients.

Pour into a tray for large muffins (6 muffin tray). My batch was a little too much batter for one pan, and I cooked off the rest in a small pyrex. Top with crumble. Bake 25 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean.