A ‘not-so-sweet’-option of the popular and easy cake

Cake

Keywords        Bananas, Snack, Banana Bread

There’s one cake that I would eat at almost any occasion without feeling guilty - banana bread.

From hiking trips via Lacrosse matches and house parties to mining operations and stressful project work, banana bread always is a great snack. Especially when it is not so sweet and with the right amount of crispiness as in this recipe. After further optimizing it step by step and measuring the ingredients, now the time has come to finally share it with you.

Content

What makes it special

Flavor and key ingredients

What to watch out for

Recipe - My best version

Different variations

In general

From my experience, banana bread is not only ony of my favorites, but pretty much everyone likes it. At least I cannot remember anyone who said “I don’t like banana bread” or even worse “I didn’t like your banana bread”. Hence my hyopthesis: If you want to bake something easy that almost everyone likes, make a banana bread.

It doesn’t even need much preparation or costly / difficult to find ingredients. So when you have bought too many bananas, why not just try baking with them? Even for beginners it’s a great start into baking. Personally, banana bread is the first cake that i have been baking independently and in my opinion it’s a great base to start with.

In addition, it really seems to me that banana bread generally makes people happy. Always when I’m sharing some - and I always bake in order to share - people really appreciate it no matter the situation. As I love making people happy, I will thus continue to bake and share my banana bread.

For me personally

I already wrote above that banana bread was the first cake that I baked alone. I know that it’s not really clear whether it’s actually a cake or a bread, but in Germany we consider it a cake so I will continue calling it that way ;-)

Anyways, the first time I baked banana bread was in Norway back in 2017 where I ended up with too many old bananas. As I prefer to eat yellow bananas, I had to do something else with the overripe bananas and figured that I might give baking a shot and it turned out that it was a great decision.

I can’t remember for sure whether it was the very first banana bread that I baked, but I have one very positive memory about banana bread “saving some friends and me” that I want to share with you:

On our road trip to the famous Trolltunga rock in Norway we carried all the food we needed for staying overnight on the mountain - incl. a banana bread. We had aimed to hike the 14km and 800m incline to Trolltunga in the afternoon in order to get there just before sunset to set up our tent. Having varying fitness levels and backpack sizes in our group, we shared the weight and effort as evenly and fairly as possible: 3 guys with small backpacks and another friend and me with the 5-person-tent (not lightweight), a single-use-BBQ for making burgers at the top for dinner and some big sleeping bags.

As most of the incline is right at the beginning, we have been pushing hard to stay on track for making it to Trolltunga before the sunset. After this most difficult part we were not only out of breath, but also already quite a bit out of energy. Luckily, I had brought the banana bread, though, and we could reload our energy with a delicious snack for the remaining 10km. In the end we made it just before dark to our camping area, enjoyed some burgers and got up before sunrise when we had the the rock formation pretty much to ourselves - before the crowds came in starting at 9am.

We all agreed that the banana bread gave us all the required energy and had certainly helped us to reach our destination in time. Thus, I always think back to our great roadtrip and hike when I bake banana bread and propose to you:

Bring a banana bread on your next hiking trip. You will be very happy to have this delicious and energy-rich snack with you.

Bananda bread stands out due to its natural sweetness and being just a little bit fluffy and moist besides the often very high density. Adding a little crispiness for example with almond flakes or another special ingredient will give an extra kick and help distinguish your version from all the other banana breads out there.

I like to make sure that the bananas themselves never come up short as the name already suggests. In my opinion,they should be the main ingredient as they are not only the main source of flavor, but also add most of the mass. Bananas make up about 60% of the version that I’m baking.

Besides the bananas, only some kind of flour and baking powder need to be added as ingredients from my experience. Eggs and butter help creating the right consistency, but there are also vegan versions to substitute these two ingredients.

There are four key factors that I pay attention to as I had some problems when not sticking to these simple rules

1. Use ripe bananas - Otherwise there will be little natural sweetness and mashing them won’t lead to a moist mixture (press the bananas lightly a few hours before baking while still unpeeled to make them get softer and ripe faster)

2. Do not use too much sugar or margarine - Otherwise it gets to sweet or fat. The flavor should mostly come from the ingredients themselves

3. Do not use a too shallow or too deep loaf pan / casserole - Either the cake will be turning too dry or burning already on the outside while not completely baked on the inside (Try to get a dough height in the loaf pan of approx. 4-8cm)

4. Use circulating air and a grid - Otherwise the heat is less evenly distributed and the cake may be burning at the top or bottom

Prep Time      20 minutes

Cook Time     50-60 minutes

Total Time     80 minutes

Servings        1 loaf (approx. 1kg)

Ingredients

• 900g overripe bananas (600g without peel /

  about 7 medium-sized bananas)

• 65g butter

• 50g brown sugar

• 2 eggs

• 225g all-purpose flour

• 35g almond flakes

• 1/4 tsp salt

• 1 heaped tsp baking powder

• 1 tsp vanilla sugar

• 1 knife tip nutmeg

Instructions (Illustrations below)

1. Peel and mash the bananas until it’s a homogenic mass. In case they’re not overripe yet, let them stay for a bit and they will become sweeter

2. Preheat the oven to 175°C air circulation

3. Lightly grease a 8cm*20cm loaf pan (or any type of cake pan with an area of approx. 200cm² and a height of 6-10cm)

4. Combine flour, baking powder, vanilla sugar, salt, nutmeg and almond flakes

5. Cut the butter in small pieces and combine with the brown sugar. Blend well with a mixer or food processor

6. First add the eggs and then the mashed bananas to the butter-sugar-mixture and blend well each time

7. Pour the banana-mixture over the flour-mixture and stir enough to moisten so that no dry flour remains

8. Pour the batter into the loaf pan (make sure the mixture has a height of at least 4cm - otherwise the bread turns out dry)

9. Place the loaf pan on a roast in the middle rack of the pre-heated oven and bake for approx. 50-60 min.

10. When baking for the first time, check regularly after 40min as some ovens have a stronger/weaker heat convection

11. Insert a toothpick or knive in the center of the loaf. When it comes out clean the banana bread is ready

12. Loosen the sides of the bread from the pan with a wooden knive or similar and turn onto a wire rack to take out the cake. Immediately turn back to the normal orientation in order to not press down the topside that nicely rose in the oven

There are hundreds of different banana bread recipes out there and almost each of them is a little bit different. In case you’r enot happy with my version, want to give it a personal touch or are missing some ingredients, just experiment a little.

For example, you could

• Go vegan by replacing butter and eggs (I’m pretty sure there are very good substitutes and great recipes, but I haven’t tried yet)

• Use a different type of flour or sweeteners, I guess oat flour would suit very well, too

• Add a special ingredient of your choice, e.g. chocolate or different nuts

The process may also be adapted to your personal circumstances. For example, in the beginning I didn’t have any type of blender in Norway and mixed everything by hand with a fork. Any type of hand blender and smoothie maker may also work though. Maybe mix butter, sugar and eggs together directly in order to reduce the butter sticking in one corner and not being blended.

In the end it is only important that you’re both happy with the final result and having spend some time baking, though :)

Inspired by

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/20144/banana-banana-bread/