Banana Blueberry Streusel Muffins

Published on July 27, 2016 by Elizabeth 44 Comments
Last Updated on January 28, 2019

The wandering traveller has returned home, for the foreseeable future – or at least until the wanderlust strikes again! I’m home now from a week’s camping in Norway (It was heaven! A blog post will follow soon!) which followed our family trip to Brussels that was close on the heels of my epic two week bikepacking trip through the highlands of Scotland (again, blog posts will follow once I get the time to sift through all the photos and write about them!). So many different places in such a short space of time. So much seen!

It’s been a summer of adventure, that’s for sure!

I’m home now, back in the comforts of my own kitchen and faced with a fruit bowl filled with incredibly over ripe bananas.

But first, a little bit about Bergen.

It rained there, a lot. I was rained on 5 days out of the 7 I spent there – apparently it’s been the worse summer for rain in Bergen since 1929. So, when the sun shone brightly one morning, and stayed in the sky for the full day, I headed to the mountains just outside the city for a spot of hiking.

It was sweltering with heat and I was sorely tempted to take a dip in Storevatnet lake on Sandviksfjellet mountain, pictured above. This place was one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to.

The hill you see to the left, above, was covered in wild blueberries. I haven’t seen wild blueberries since my Canadian childhood! Aah, so many summers of my youth spent picking blueberries – one for the bowl, ten for me. It was slow going in the summer sun.

I still had blueberries on the brain when my husband and children collected me from the airport (during the summer months there’s a direct flight from Shetland to Bergen), so I popped a big packet of them into our supermarket trolley en route home. Shop bought are never as good as wild, but they’d do.

When faced with a mountain of over ripe bananas and these blueberries I quite fancied making blueberry banana muffins, and I found a lovely sounding recipe for banana crumb muffins in a recipe notebook my grandmother sent me, so I tweaked it a bit, UK-ifying the measures and adding a generous portion of juicy blueberries.

A wholly successful endeavour.

As an aside – my bike is broken and I’m currently off road. Thanks to the ScotRail strike in June which forced my travelling companion and I to alter our plans (and for us to miss the flying lessons I had booked in Perth! *shakes angry fist at ScotRail*) we were forced to either a) cycle from Fort William to Aberdeen to catch the ferry home (after cycling 400 miles and climbing Ben Nevis we weren’t keen on this option) or b) find an alternate way to get to Aberdeen. None of the car hire places in Fort William offer one way car hires, so the bus it was.

To cut a long story short (*shakes angry fist at CitiLink and their cycle-unfriendly policies)(*HUGE thanks to Stagecoach who know how to treat their customers*) we had to disassemble our bikes and wrap them in layers of black bin bags and duct tape before we were allowed to put them in the underbus storage on the CitiLink bus. The bashing about underneath has caused some damage to the gear derailer and it doesn’t work any more. Tweaking has made it worse and now the bike is unrideable. It’s got a date with the Shetland Community Bike Project today, so I should hopefully be back on the road soon!

Pictured above, our youngest son (age 7), taking a muffin break while trying his best to fix the derailer for me, bless his cotton socks.

The generous sized muffin (we all like a big breakfast muffin, right?) are incredibly soft and moist with little bursts of blueberry throughout. The cinnamon scented streusel topping adds a lovely crunch texture and appetite stimulating aroma to the muffin.

All in all, they’re a pretty fantastic muffin if I do say so myself, and they didn’t last long in our house!

How do you use up over ripe bananas? Let me know in the comments!