Banana Bread- Recipe

When your bananas look like they're turning into giraffes, what do you do with them?

Giraffananas?
You make banana bread!


Here's how you do it.

Ingredients:

- 4oz slightly salted butter, softened
- 8oz caster sugar
- 2 eggs
- 10oz plain flour
- 1tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 4 very ripe bananas (the more sad-looking, the better)
- 1tbsp lemon juice
- 1tsp vanilla extract

Method:

1) Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C, and butter and flour the insides of a loaf tin to stop the cake batter from sticking.

2) With an electric mixer, beat the softened butter and sugar until well-combined and pale. It won't cream together in the same way as equal quantities of each would- it'll be drier because of the larger sugar-to-butter ratio.


3) Beat the eggs in one at a time, and continue to beat for a couple of minutes more until fluffy and white.

4) Mash your giraffananas bananas up with a fork, along with the vanilla and the lemon juice to stop it from going brown. A bit lumpy is fine- in fact, better. Once I used my hand blender to soupify the bananas, and the cake ended up a bit on the dense side.



5) Add their bananas to the egg-butter-sugar mixture, and stir well with a wooden spoon (you can put the electric mixer away, now). The batter will look curdle, but not to worry! It'll come together in the next step.


Don't panic!
 6) Dump your flour and bicarb in- you don’t need to sift it- and mix gently. You don't want to overbeat the batter at this stage or you'll get a tough cake: stirring it until everything is literally only just incorporated will give you a lighter, fluffier cake.

Stop mixing!
 7) Pour your banana cake batter into your prepared loaf tin, and bake it for an hour. Test the cake before taking it out of the oven by skewering it through the centre: if the skewer comes out clean, it’s ready!


 8) Turn the oven off, let the cake cool in the tin for about 10mins or until you can touch the tin without branding yourself, and then turn your cake out onto a wire rack to cool properly- if you can wait that long. In my house, the cake barely left the tin before slices began to disappear!


Banana bread can sometimes be stodgy and heavy- this one was one light and fluffy banana bread, and perfectly moist without it being gooey. It's perfect on its own, but we also had it with caramel ice-cream for dessert.


You could also toast it, dip it in egg and fry it French toast-style, make banana trifle with it... anything you like. It really doesn't need any of this treatment though- it's beautiful on its own- and I certainly don't think I'll have enough of it left to experiment with, soon!

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