I’m more of a baker than I am someone inclined to cookery, but I also am bizarrely intuitive about how I bake, so riffing off the cuff with recipes is more my style, plus the massive variation in baking when it comes into taking into account the size of your non-standard ingredients, ambient air humidity and temperature, and whether or not the chocolate tempering Gods have decided to smile upon you or not. Usually the answer is not. I am consistently baffled by our oven, (learning it’s hot spots is a whole ordeal), and the end results of baking, but they’re usually at least edible.
So there’s your fair warning. Still, here’s more or less the recipe I use for banana bread:
- 2 cups of unpacked down flour (all purpose is fine)
- 1 levelled, unpacked teaspoon of baking soda
- 1 big pinch (thumb to four fingers) of normal salt (ie, not finishing salt or flaky crystals)
- 1/2 cup of brown sugar and 1/2 of white sugar, or 1 cup of white sugar with a glug of molasses
- 2 eggs you’ve whisked until they’re homogenous and there’s no gloopy whites
- 1/2 a stick of butter, softened, easier if you can smush it up with a fork. NOT melted.
- At LEAST 6 bananas, but it comes out good with up to 9ish normal size bananas. (The more bananas you add, the squishier the end loaf turns out. You may want to divide them into their natural threes, peel off the strings, and then squish them into goop with a fork. Ideally the bananas are really brown and speckly on the outside and sort of horrifically bruised.)
- Chocolate, whatever you like. Either a chopped up (or smashed in a ziplock) full bar, or about half a cup of chocolate chips, preferably the bar. You can add like, a handful of chopped nuts, but the babymeow isn’t crazy about nuts in his so we don’t. Cutting up squares of those caramel candies is also a possibility, (about a cupped handful) or a handful of dried coconut. You can go crazy and all of them, so long as the batter looks like it’s holding, but I normally just add the chocolate.
- 2 glugs of vanilla extract. I don’t measure this out usually, just until it smells nice.
Preheat your oven to 350, and grab a handful of butter to smash all over the inside of a baking tin. (This also does work with a muffin tin, and honestly, this is probably the better option if you don’t feel like eating an entire loaf of banana bread at once or fussing with cutting.) You can be dainty and just rub the sticky wrapper on the insides, but if you do add ‘too much butter’ it just kind of makes a lovely crunchy golden crust on the perimeter, so a win either way.
Slap together all of the dry ingredients. Then, beat the softened butter with your sugar, until it goes all grainy and gloopy. It should look like you’ve made a terrible mistake. Mix in the other wet ingredients. Then, slop it into the flour. Resist the urge to stir like a mad man- just fold it into itself until everything’s nice and wet. If you have an icecream scoop, that’s great for portioning out the batter if you’re using a tin, though a spoon and a pair of chopsticks works fine. You can also just go ahead and dump it all into the larger baking tin if you’re going that route.
Bake for about a hour, or until the toothpick test (jamming one into the deepest bit and making sure it doesn’t come out all goopy) comes out clean. Let it cool thoroughly.
If you take some powdered icing sugar, and a dab of milk (literally go in a few drops at a time, or you will make it too runny) you can glaze it afterwards. Substituting some of the milk with a single drop of food colouring can make it fun for little ones to decorate by spooning some overtop, but don’t add too much or it’ll be bitter (it’s easier if you have gel food colouring stuck on a toothpick and whisked in, but most people don’t unless they bake frequently, and the watery stuff works fine.)