Updates Friday is here! A nice weekend can definitely be preceded by a nice dessert. We had some ripe bananas, peanut butter to use up (we are not accustomed to use PB in Slovenia or Spain) and a handful of walnuts. The rest is basic baking stuff. I looked up some banana bread recipes and I found TONS of nice recipes I have already used for banana bread and a million to be used in the future weekends to come. You must have noticed by now that our culinary experiments are based on what we have to use up in the kitchen storage, so a kilo of overripe bananas has to be used in a sensitive way. Banana bread it is. Here is how the internet feels about banana breads (my favs):
http://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/banana-bread/51427396-6764-4b0a-a73a-78c683c703d2
http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/banana_bread/
http://www.kulinarika.net/recepti/17823/sladice/zmagovalni-bananin-kruh/
http://www.deliciousdays.com/archives/2006/10/19/peanut-butter-banana-bread-or-a-bumpy-road-to-love/
One of my best friends commented on how a spoonful of Nutella can give a spectacular twist to banana breads but we ran out of Nutella lately 😀 So the next similar thing on the shelf with as creamy texture as hazelnut spread was a jar of Jif, an American re-known brand of peanut butter (you’ve got it-we bought it during our trip to NY this Xmass). There are also some more than interesting recipes on the PB manufacturer’s website:
http://www.jif.com/recipes-with-peanut-butter
And coming back to my baking trip-the recipe I decided to cling to was the one from the following blog. It convinced me with the presentation, extremely neatly organized recipe and a simple step by step guidance. It was love at first sight.
I always reduce the amount of sugar by half or so and it always turns out that it was the right way to do it. For my taste. I know I am supposed to prepare a dessert but I am not actually a fan of eating spoonfuls of crystal sugar for the sake of it. You place the following ingredients in a bowl and mix them well with a blender/hand mixer:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda + ½ tsp baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
4 ripe bananas, mashed (I use a smoothie blender 😀 )
2 tbs creamy peanut butter (if more is used, it can give the cake a strange aftertaste)
1 cup light brown sugar (fine demerara is best, with its sandy texture)
⅓ cup milk
¼ cup vegetable oil (I use sunflower)
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract (I use BIO ground vanilla beans from SPAR)
1 cup dark chocolate chips and/or a fist of chopped walnuts (or other nuts)
Mix well and pour into a parchment paper lined or only well greased tray (a 28 cm cake tray or a rectangular shaped high tray). Bake fr approx. 50 minutes at 160°C.
For just the two of us it is enough to prepare one banana bread per weekend (visitors not included 😉 ) and it can last for a couple of days. The good thing about banana breads is that it keeps getting better in the storage so…let me know how it went and if you were able to check how it is the third day after baking. We cannot find out cause we eat it all on the second day… 😦
Hope you like this weekend’s dessert choice, more recipes and posts will keep being posted, since the weather is rather “dull” (read: shitty, grey, blinding, white, humid, windy…yeah, shitty). Be well!
blackplate 