Banana Nut Cream Cheese Stuffed Muffins

I loooove to bake on rainy days. It's one of my favorite things to do, and today, I had a lot of it to do! Well, not that much... but when you have a baby that needs her mommy cause she's about to pop another tooth and all she wants to do is snuggle, and then you also have a couple loads of laundry to fold and put away, neverending dishes to wash, and regular house cleaning stuff....it
seemed a little overwhelming this morning.


Me and my mom are working on a cookbook, so I had a couple recipes to test out and bake for that, but I also had a few banana's that were well past their glory days. Like so ripe, they were almost rotten.


The same old banana bread routine bores me and I had some cream cheese to use up and the combination of bananas and cream cheese sounded perfect to me!


These muffins were indeed perfect. I had one right out of the oven and it was amazing...I love eating things that have surprises in the middle.

Banana Nut Cream Cheese Stuffed Muffins
Pre-heat oven to 375. Grease a standard 12 cup muffin pan.


Muffin Batter:
2 cups flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 very ripe bananas, mashed
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup oil
2 eggs
1 Tbsp. vanilla 
1 cup chopped pecans, divided


Filling:
4 oz. cream cheese
1/4 Cup sugar



For the filling:
With an electric mixer, beat together cream cheese and sugar on high til smooth and creamy and well combined. Line a deep bowl or cup with a ziploc bag and fill with filling.



For the muffins:
In a large bowl, mix together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and sugars.
In a small separate bowl, mash bananas very well. Add buttermilk, oil eggs and vanilla, and mix well.
Add wet ingredients to dry, add in /2 cup pecans and mix just until combined.
Drop 1-2 tablespoons batter in muffin pan, enough to cover the bottom of each cup.


Snip off a good size corner (about 1/2") of your bag with filling and squeeze about a tablespoon of the filling onto first layer of muffin batter.

Cover with the filling with batter, filling up the muffin cups almost all the way.
Top with remaining pecans.

Bake 20-22 minutes til golden brown.
Let cool in pan for 5 minutes before trying to gently remove with a butter knife.

Makes 12-16 muffins.

Enjoy!