Feb 19

Banana Bread

I’ve brought in this banana bread into work no less than three times, so it was a perfect start to the extravaganza. My favorite recipe is from Amanda at I Am Baker. Her recipes are always rock solid and frequent my Pinterest feed. The addition of yogurt to the recipe keeps the bread super moist.

IMAG0823Banana bread – regular, dark chocolate, and butterscotch variations.

I like to make variations including dark chocolate chips, or the office favorite, butterscotch chips. The addition of the chips is a bit tricky, as they will inevitably fall to the bottom of the pan and create a delicious, but sticky bottom. I’ve tried coating the chips in flour and adding the chips halfway through baking, but I haven’t had much success. I haven’t given up hope on the addition of the chips during baking as there has to be a sweet spot where the batter has thickened, but the top isn’t set yet. I’m sure my work won’t mind more trials in finding this spot!

Recipe – from I Am Baker

Ingredients

2 eggs

1/3 cup vanilla yogurt

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1 cup mashed bananas – I’ve been using 3-4 bananas to make up this volume

1- 1/2 cups sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1-3/4  cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1/2  tsp salt

Directions

Preheat oven to 325˚F. Grease and flour a loaf pan. Mash the bananas with a fork until all of the large chunks are gone. I tend to use frozen bananas for this recipe, and I freeze the bananas right in their peels. To defrost, stick the bananas in a bowl of water for about five minutes and the peels will slip right off.

Blend together the eggs, yogurt, oil, vanilla extract and bananas in mixer with low speed. The stringy bits of the bananas, which is called phloem (pronounced “flom”), will wrap around the beater of your mixer. Don’t worry about removing them prior, I like to have the beater just filter them out for me.

Add in sugars and mix well.  Then add flour, baking soda, and salt and mix until just combined.

Pour into prepared pan and bake 1 – 1.5 hours or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. A quick check I do to tell if it is ready to test is the “jiggle check.” Jiggle the pan and if the top still moves then it is not ready to check with a toothpick. Only after the whole top is set is it worth checking the doneness with a toothpick.

Feb 4

Banana Extravaganza!

I receive a bi-weekly delivery of fruits and veggies to my apartment. It’s kind of like a CSA, so it’s always exciting to see what new things I will have to eat. It forces me to find ways to cook foods I generally wouldn’t pick up from the grocery store. Luckily, bananas are harvested year-round, so I’ve always had a bunch in the box. Well, since I’ve been living by myself, I don’t always have a chance to eat the entire bunch before they are super brown. So into the freezer they go! I stick them in as is, right in their peels. This has been going on for well over a year, so I’ve managed to have quite the collection in my freezer. Forty, to be exact. Well….forty was the number I initially counted. And I counted wrong. It was closer to fifty….fifty-two.

Perfect brown spots....just about ready for mashing!

Perfect brown spots….just about ready for mashing!

Needless to say, the bananas quite took over my freezer space. It was an avalanche of bananas every time you open the door. My fiancé finally put his foot down and said that I have to get rid of them before we move in together this summer. Well, in order to get rid of them, I decided to make as many different banana baked goods as I could find and have my coworkers reap the benefits. Thus began the extravaganza.