So I had some left-over cranberry sauce from Christmas. We don’t have it often, but a recipe I was making for Boxing Day dinner used it (a Christmas Chicken Wellington-it was lovely) and I had roughly 3/4 of the tin remaining. I wasn’t going to use it it the foreseeable future so I wondered if it would make a good ingredient in a cake. I also had a couple of bananas that we were never going to eat-neither of us like bananas that have gone too far, even if they are supposed to be better for you. I hate to waste things, so what about a banana bread?
I have a favourite banana bread recipe that I’ve already posted about (see Spotty Bananas?-Caribbean Banana Bread) but thought I’d like a slightly lighter loaf. I had a look, on line, for a recipe that I could maybe adapt to use my cranberry sauce, and thought I’d have a go. It worked!
| 350 g/ 8 oz /2 cups all-purpose (plain) flour |
| 125 g/ 4 oz/½ cup granulated sugar |
| 60 g/ 2 oz/¼ cup light soft brown sugar |
| 1¼ tsp baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) |
| ½ tsp salt |
| 2 large ripe bananas, mashed |
| ¾ tin (approx) tin cranberry sauce (the one with whole cranberries) |
| 60 ml/2 fl oz/¼ cup sour cream or soured table cream* |
| 2 large eggs |
| 60 ml/2 fl oz/¼ cup vegetable oil |
| 2 tsp vanilla extract |
| Other dried fruits or nuts to taste |
The recipe callled for sour cream, which I didn’t have in, I made a ‘butter-cream’ substitute by placing 1 tsp of lemon juice into a small jug, making it up to ¼ cup with 18% cream (coffee cream), stirring and leaving to stand for 5 minutes before using.
Preheat the oven to 350˚F/180˚C/Gas 4
Grease a suitable loaf tin -9/10 inch length is preferable. if liked, you can add a strip of parchment paper, with two long sides on the longer sides of the loaf pan to help with lifting out the baked loaf, although I didn’t need it.
Place all of the dry ingredients into a large bowl and whisk to mix well.
Mash the bananas in a second bowl. Add the cranberry sauce and mix well. Then add the cream, eggs, vanilla and vegetable oil, sequentially, mixing after each addition (a whisk works well in the later stages).
Add the wet ingredient mix into the dry ingredients, mixing with a wooden spoon until just incorporated. Add any additional ingredients (dried fruit, nuts, etc.), and mix in. I chose to add a handful of sultana raisins because, why not? Transfer to the prepared loaf tin.
Bake for 50 minutes, or so, in the centre of the preheated oven. Loaf is finished when a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the tin for 10 minutes, before removing and completing cooling on a rack.
Very moist, nice as is or lightly buttered. Would also work with a drizzle of glace icing on top. Almost worth buying a tin of cranberry sauce for!
I’ve also made an alternative version, using the same basic recipe but without the cranberry sauce. I had a lot of dried fruit left over from the chocolate biscuit cake and I thought I’d use it up creatively! So I made the bread as described, omitting cranberry sauce but adding about ½ tsp of mixed spice, and, at the end, added in about a cup full of a mix of halved glace cherries, chopped dried apricots, sultana raisins and dried sweetened cranberries. That worked too!
The Pudding Queen 