So Mark is putting up with the fruit loaves but he did ask if I could find one with chocolate in it. No sooner said than done! Chocolate and bananas are good bedfellows, anyway, so it should be good. I found a recipe, on line-another of those UK recipes in grams only (I really recommend an electric scale, they are quite cheap really), using self-raising flour and golden caster sugar. I’ve never seen golden caster sugar here, but I had some brilliant yellow sugar in the pantry and I thought that might work ok. We would see.
Chocolate Chip Banana Bread
140 g self-raising flour
140 g brilliant yellow sugar*
140 g softened unsalted butter
1 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
3 ripe bananas, mashed
2 large eggs, beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract
100 g chocolate chips**
*recipe states golden caster sugar
**I used milk chocolate chips
My butter was a bit hard, so I used an old trick to soften it. I filled a glass jug with boiling water, tipped it out again and then popped in my wrapped butter. It worked perfectly.
Softening butter
Preheat the oven to 350˚F/ 325 ˚F convection/180˚C/160 ˚C fan/Gas 4
Grease a suitable loaf tin -900g/2lb. Line with parchment, if preferred.
Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. This was probably a bit harder to do as the sugar, although fine, wasn’t the superfine state of caster sugar. It did go well in the end, though.
Mix the vanilla with the eggs. Add the eggs to the butter mixture, in portions, beating after each addition.
Softened butter and sugarCreaming butter and sugarBeating in the eggs
Fold in the flour, baking powder, salt and bananas. Fold in most of the chocolate chips, reserving a handful. I found a silicone spatula to be the perfect tool for this.
Folding in the flour mixtureBananas added. Folding in the chocolate chips
Transfer to the prepared loaf tin. Smooth the top and sprinkle with remaining chocolate chips.
Ready to bake
Bake, 50 minutes, or until well-risen and a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean. Keep an eye on it as mine baked quite fast and was ready about 45 minutes. Leave to cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack to cool completely.
Fresh out of the ovenOut to cool
A tasty bread, with pieces of banana and the chocolate chips still discrete in the texture. Mark likes his buttered. It would also work well with semi-sweet or dark chocolate chips, for a more chocolatey hit. The brilliant yellow sugar seemed to have been a good alternative for golden caster sugar, providing a very slight molasses taste. Ordinary sugar would probably work, too, although the colour of the bread would be paler.
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!
Ingredients
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.
Flour, sugar, brown sugar, baking soda and salt
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).
Mashed bananaAdd the cranberry sauceafter adding cream, eggs, oil and vanilla
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.
Incorporating the wet into the dry ingredients. A wooden spoon works well.
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.
Out of the ovenOut of the ovenCooling on a rack
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!
Alternative version, lots of lovely fruity pieces!
Bananas are going overripe quicker now that the year is heating up. I do keep them in another room, that tends cooler than the kitchen, but it’s inevitable so I might have to start keeping them in the fridge. As a result, I tend to buy only 3 or 4 at a time since I’m really the only one who eats them; Mark may have the odd one but there will be weeks between each one. Unfortunately, I forgot to mention this to him when he did the shopping last week, so he came back with a hand of about 9. With the best will in the world I can’t eat that many and today they were looking (and smelling) very, very ripe. I thought I’d be making banana bread again. Then I thought, I wonder if there’s something else I could make? I’d take a look on line.
I found a recipe for a coffee cake, in both senses of the word. That is, a cake to eat with a cup of coffee and one with coffee flavouring-in this case a coffee buttercream. It was an intriguing combination and, with a little substitution, I had everything I needed.
The cake recipe called for butter, but I was a bit short of it so I substituted soft margarine. It also wanted sour cream, which I don’t keep in. However, greek yoghurt is apparently a suitable alternative and this I do have since I routinely add it to my breakfasts (along with bananas). It was 0% fat yoghurt, but I thought it would work. Finally it wanted a 9 x 13 inch baking dish. My largest one, a pyrex dish, was 8.5 by 11 inch, but I thought it would be ok, although the cake might take a few minutes longer to bake.
The Recipe (for cake):
½ cup/125 g /4 oz soft margarine, or butter, softened*
1 cup/250 g/8 oz granulated sugar**
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1 tsp/5 ml vanilla extract/essence
2 cups/250 g/8 oz all-purpose (plain) flour
2 tsp/ 10 ml baking soda (bicarbonate of soda)
½ tsp salt
1½ cups mashed banana (about 3 ripe bananas)
1 cup/ 250 ml/ 8 fl oz greek yogurt or sour cream***
* I used soft margarine
**caster sugar would work better if not in North America
***I used 0% greek yoghurt
Preheat the oven to 350˚F/180˚C/Gas 4. Grease a suitable baking dish and set aside.
Measure out all of the ingredients, as follows. Note that I used the cup measures for this cake. When measuring flours in cups, it’s important not to scoop up the flour with the cup, since this will lead to a packed cup and be too much flour. Instead, fill the cup measure using a spoon and level off.
Measure the flour, baking soda and salt and sift into a bowl, set aside.
Measure 1 cup of yoghurt or sour cream and set aside.
Place the bananas into a bowl and mash well with a fork. Set aside.
Measure the margarine or butter, and sugar into a large bowl.
Flour, soda and saltGreek yoghurtMashed bananasSugar and margarine
Cream the margarine/butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.
Creamed to light and fluffy
Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well between each addition. Add the vanilla and mix well.
Adding eggsAfter eggs have been added
Start to add the flour mixture, yoghurt/cream and bananas in aliquots one after the other, beating well between each addition. The result with be a batter with a nice dropping consistency; there will be some small lumps of banana, that’s fine. Transfer to the greased dish and level the top.
Everything addedDropping consistencyReady to bake
Bake. The recipe, with the 9 x 13 inch tin, suggests 35-40 minutes. Mine took slightly longer, maybe 45 minutes. The cake is done when a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Remove from the oven and leave to cool, in the dish, on a wire rack.
I turned mine out onto the rack after about 30 minutes, to cool completely.
The recipe suggested a coffee-flavoured buttercream to frost the cake. It seemed an unusual combination but I was willing to give it a try.
The Buttercream:
⅓ cup/85 g/2.5 oz butter, softened
2½ cups/390 g/12.5 oz icing sugar (powdered sugar/confectioner’s sugar)
1 tsp (5 ml) espresso powder, dissolved in 1 tbsp (15 ml) hot water, and cooled*
1 tbsp (15 ml) milk
* the recipe suggests 2 tsp instant coffee powder, dissolved in milk. if using instant coffee, not espresso, use a total of 2 tbsp milk in this mixture.
I realised that I’d forgotten to buy some more icing sugar, and I wasn’t going to have enough for this topping. What to do? Well, I thought I’d try to make some, using my blender. I added some granulated sugar and tried to grind to a fine powder. It did it, too, but not as fine as the commercial stuff, so my icing ended up being slightly gritty.
Add the butter (and I do recommend butter here, not margarine) to the bowl of a stand mixer and beat until fluffy.
Make up the espresso with 1 tbsp of hot water, and leave to cool. Note that strong coffee lovers might want to increase the coffee to 2 tsp espresso powder.
When the butter is fluffy start to add the icing sugar. If it becomes too dry, add in the espresso solution. Add 1 tbsp milk (additional may be added if the mix remains too stiff). beat, scraping down the sides of the bowl, until light and fluffy.
When the cake is cool, layer the buttercream over to top. Slice and serve.
The cake has a light, spongy texture, actually quite ‘muffin-y’, I think. I expect that the mixture could easily be baked in muffin cases to make banana muffins (with a reduced baking time). Some people have baked it in a swiss roll tin, and then rolled it up with the coffee buttercream as a filling, which sound like fun. It has a light, banana flavour, not too strong, and a hint of spice might make a good addition. The coffee buttercream went with it very well, I thought rather surprisingly, although I think I would go a little stronger with the coffee flavouring on another occasion. All-in-all, it was a nice alternative to the problem of what to do with overripe bananas. I shall have to freeze some of it, though because its awfully big for two!
I had a sort-out of the freezer a couple of days ago, and came across no less than 4 frozen bananas. If a banana is getting towards the state of ‘no return’, I pop the peeled banana into the freezer for use in baking or for making a banana molasses mush that attracts moths! Mark, my husband, moth-traps during Spring, Summer and Autumn and has had an amazing number of different species, photographed at our outside lights. There are some moths, however, that don’t come to lights and a smelly, sticky banana-flavoured mush is just the thing to attract them. Still, it’s a couple of months before he’ll be trapping again so I thought I’d use the bananas for baking.
I also had half-a-jar of mincemeat left from Christmas, sitting in the back of the fridge. now, mincemeat does last a long time but, once the jar is open, I don’t like it to wait too long. Maybe some sort of banana/mincemeat cake would work? I didn’t want to go for banana bread again, instead I wanted something with a cake-y texture and, maybe, even something that could be made into cupcakes? We are trying to reduce the amount of cakes, etc., we are eating (hence the reduced number of posts for this blog) so perhaps cupcakes would freeze well and be able to be brought out when needed?
I went on line and found a recipe for Banana Cake, I think from Australia. That might work, I’d just make a few minor changes and hope for the best. The cake was supposed to be made in a 20 cm (8 inch) cake tin but I decided to go for cupcake liners in muffin tins. now, I make very few muffins or cupcakes, so I was a bit surprised to find that I own no less than three 12-place muffin tins and 2 packets of cupcake liners! Where did they all come from?
Muffin trays and liners
Ingredients
The recipe called for butter, but I decided that I’d sub in soft margarine. It also wanted soft brown sugar, but I had that pesky yellow sugar to use up. It also wanted buttermilk, so I made my own with 2% milk and lemon juice (see Celebration Time-Double Chocolate Devil’s Food Cake for instructions on how to do this). I’m not avoiding buttermilk recipes any longer!
The Recipe:
125 g/4 oz/ ½ cup soft butter or margarine
195 g/7.5 oz/ 1 ¼ cup soft brown sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
125 g/ 4 oz/ 1 cup self-raising flour
63 g/2 oz / ½ cup plain (all-purpose) flour
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
3-4 mashed bananas (about 1 ½ cups/375 ml)
125 ml/ ½ cup buttermilk
½ jar mincemeat
Preheat the oven to 180 C/350 F/Gas 4. I used 350 F convection, as this would save me from having to rotate my muffin trays once they were in the oven.
Cream together the butter or margarine, sugar, cinnamon and vanilla until light and fluffy.
Creaming the butter, sugar, cinnamon and vanilla extract
Add the two eggs, one at at time, beating between each addition.
After adding the eggs
Mix together the flours and soda in a separate bowl, preferably sift or whisk to ensure a good mixture.
Add the flours, banana and buttermilk, in batches, beating lightly between each addition. Fold in the mincemeat and mix through. Transfer spoonsful to the cupcake cases. My mixture made 30 cupcakes. Place in the oven to bake.
Ready to bake
Now, the cake was supposed to take 1 hour to bake, but it clearly wasn’t going to take as long for cupcakes. They are cooked when a skewer comes out clean, so I checked after about 20 minutes. It actually took about 25 minutes for these cupcakes to bake.
Out of the oven
I left them to cool on a wire rack, before packing them in plastic tubs to freeze (the layers separated with parchment paper).
Cooling
It was remarkably successful, the cakes were light but with a bit of a sticky feel from the banana. The mincemeat added a spicy finish and took off some of the banana flavour (I’m not a fan of overly banana-flavoured things). It used up the bananas and mincemeat very nicely. I think they will be nice, warmed with custard, or maybe with a light lemon-flavoured glace icing. I took a couple out of the freezer this morning and they took only a few minutes to thaw and they made a nice, light, after-lunch sweetener. I shall have to accumulate more frozen bananas!
The Pudding Queen 