This has been my long impending post. Soon after I made banana bread at home, my laptop conked off for various reasons which are beyond an understanding of this technology challenged baker. Anyways, I have been wanting to bake a bread at home from a long time. There are various recipes which came to my mind and disappeared just for the fear of doing something incredibly wrong with the whole bread making process and also the baking time which is generally required to bake these at home. This was unusual as I don’t really prefer to bake in the middle of the week because of the various house-hold chores that need more attention but we were visiting a friend who had delivered just a month back! So, as a personal touch I thought it’d be best to carry these to her home.
As this was my first time at baking a bread, I went ahead and followed Laura Vitale’s recipe to the T. Best part of this banana bread if you may ask – it is simple and super comforting. I personally consider my dishes to be super successful when Little A ask for more. And after eating this he did ask for more pieces of bread, so go figure. Or just head over to the kitchen and reward yourself. Common, you deserve it! The look of the banana bread with crispy brown crust on the top will make you want to pat your back. Really.
Ingredients -
All Purpose Flour – 2 cups
Granulated Sugar – 1 1/2 cup
Unsalted Butter – 1 stick, room temperature
Ripe bananas – 4nos, lightly mashed with a fork
Cinnamon – ½ tsp
Baking Powder – 1 tsp
Baking Soda – 1 tsp
Salt – 1 tsp
Eggs – 2 nos
Full Cream Milk – 2 Tbsp
Vanilla Extract- ½ tsp
Method -
Line the bottom of a 9×5 inch loaf pan with parchment paper and grease the sides of the pan with butter. Preheat the oven to 180 Degrees Celcius. In a food processor with whisk attachment cream together butter and sugar on pulse 4. Add in eggs one at a time and whisk well to combine. Add mashed bananas and vanilla extract. Whisk again at pulse 4 for a minute or two so that everything is mixed well. Sieve together flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon and salt in a seperate bowl. Add this to the butter-egg mixture until just combined on pulse 3. Make sure not to over mix as it hardens the bread. Keep adding milk to the flour slowly while it is mixing with the egg mixture. Remove the processor bowl and give one last stir with a spatula to scrape from the sides and bottom. Pour the mixture into the lined loaf pan and bake for an hour but be sure to check at the 50 mins mark to see if the tooth pick inserted at the center comes out clean. I know you cannot wait to dig in soon after it comes out of the oven but cool for about 30 mins on a wire rack before cutting in the bread so that it doesn’t fall apart and turn into crumbs. Slice and serve. I served with cream but you can serve it with anything you want.
