Nigella Lawson recipe will make overripe bananas taste amazing again

Stop throwing away your overripe bananas - this hack could give them a new lease of life.

We all know we should be incorporating more fruit and veg into our diets, but buying too much fruit in our weekly food shop can lead to us wasting food when it inevitably goes mushy long before we can eat it all.

One of the biggest offenders when it comes to overripe fruits is the banana. While they do wonders for our insides as they're rich in potassium and fibre, they only have a small window in which they're perfectly ripe.

Before long, you're left with brown banana skins and a mushy mess inside. You might think that when this happens it's time to throw your bananas away, but don't be so hasty! However, thereare plenty of things you can do to use them up without letting them go to waste.

Celebrity chef Nigella Lawson shared one of these hacks on her Instagram page recently, and it'll turn your overripe bananas into something incredibly delicious - muffins.

Nigella shared the recipe for her banana butterscotch muffins in a post on her website, and you can also find it in her 2007 cookbook, Nigella Express. The muffins take just 20 minutes to cook, and you only need eight ingredients.

Ingredients

• 3 medium - 450 grams (total weight with skin on) - very ripe bananas
• 125 millilitres vegetable oil
• 2 large eggs
• 250 grams plain flour
• 100 grams caster sugar
• ½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 150 grams butterscotch chips (or chocolate chips)

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C/180°C Fan/gas mark 6/400°F and line a 12-bun muffin tin with muffin papers.
2. Peel and mash the bananas and set aside for a moment.
3. Pour the oil into a jug and beat in the eggs.
4. Put the flour, sugar, bicarbonate of soda and baking powder into a large bowl and mix in the beaten-egg-and-oil mixture, followed by the mashed bananas.
5. Fold in the butterscotch chips, then place equal quantities in the prepared muffin tin — I use an ice cream scoop and a spatula - and bake in the oven for 20 minutes.

Nigella's recipe makes 12 delicious muffins, and if butterscotch isn't your thing, you can even swap the butterscotch chips for chocolate chips. The chef noted: " White chocolate morsels can be used in place of the butterscotch ones and my children seem to love both with equal fervour, though I'm pretty fond of these with dark chocolate chips, too."

And on her Instagram post, commenters welcomed the recipe as a "nice change" from banana bread, which is most people's go-to recipe when it comes to using up old bananas.

One person said: "I make these all the time so easy. No wasting banana."

Another added: "My go-to recipe! I use chocolate chips instead of the butterscotch - works well with frozen bananas and they freeze well too!"