Friday, September 18, 2009

September 16, 2009: Embellished banana bread

It's been a challenge, single-handedly munching my way through the Green Line bananas each fortnight. (Michael will not do a thing to help, except possibly don rubber gloves and escort them to the bin.) Inevitably a few bananas started browning and I transferred them to the freezer for future baking.

I actually retrieved them in a matter of days, looking for a kitchen distraction during a working-from-home lunch time. I realised that I had everything I needed in the pantry for a loaf of banana bread and while delving into the freezer I discovered about half a cup of frozen berries - into the mix they went, along with four ailing chopped fresh strawberries. I stirred some roasted hazelnuts through the batter, and substituted half a cup of the wholemeal flour for an equal volume of dessicated coconut.

Though it looked pretty similar on the outside, slices of this loaf bore little resemblance to my original batch. The cake was especially soft and moist thanks to the coconut, and the seam of berries was quite something - in fact, I could barely detect the banana at all! If only I'd been a bit more devious in introducing this to Michael, he might have started scoffing slices as fast as I did.

5 comments:

  1. Oh yum! The swirl of berries looks great. I just can't understand Michael (and Emily's) ridiculous vendetta against THE BEST FRUIT OF ALL.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's what we've been doing with our bananas too - baking, not binning. (You can request not to get bananas...)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Make banana icecream - I keep buying oodles of bananas thinking I'll be able to freeze them to blend into icecream later but they always get eaten.... and it's just me that's eating them!!

    All you do is freeze banana, blend banana. Give it a bit of time in the blender/food processer and it gets lovely and creamy all on it's own. You can add extras as you please but I like it as is :D

    PS: that loaf looks lusious

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hah, I just clicked through to recommend raw banana ice cream myself. It really is awesome. I like it with passionfruit pulp, or mixed with some (real, 100%) peanut or almond butter.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks, Miss T! This is the largest volume of bananas I've ever eaten. Must admit that I've been a bit 'meh' on them in the past but I've enjoyed having them back on the menu. :-)

    Hi Penny! I didn't realise that we could make requests. I'll happily stick with bananas for now, as I've just begun making some great smoothies with them!

    Hey ABB & Ruth, thank for the tip on banana icecream! I'll have to get into that as the weather warms up. :-)

    ReplyDelete