Banana Bread

I love baking and cooking. I am always looking to challenge, explore, and push myself in the kitchen. My goal with this blog is to share that journey.

To start off this journey, I chose a nice loaf of banana bread. I have made banana bread before but this recipe was a new one and a very simple one at that. A perfect way to ease into this. The recipe comes from the “Tassajara Bread Book”. I followed the recipe very closely, except I was short about 6 Tbsp of honey, and attempted to substitute an extra banana to make up for any lost sweetness. I also cut out the 1/4 tsp of salt.

The ingredients pictured above are baking soda, whole wheat flour, bananas, butter, honey (slightly less than the recipe called for, that little honey bear can be deceiving), eggs, walnuts, and grated lemon. I liked that this recipe called for the rind of 1 lemon; it added for some extra zest.

I preheated the oven and greased my pan. In a large bowl, I went on to mix together the baking soda and flour. In my mixer bowl, I creamed the butter and honey and once that was well mixed I added the eggs and lemon zest. For the next step, I added a third of the dry ingredients along with a third of the banana to my mixer, and began incorporating them. I alternated adding the banana and dry ingredients two more times each. I removed the mixing bowl and folded in the walnuts by hand. 

As pictured above, I poured the batter into my bread pan; shaking it a bit to let it settle to the edges. Then it was off to the oven.

I followed the recipe and placed it in the oven for about 50 minutes at 350. It felt like a lot longer than 50 minutes, but finally it was time to check if it was done. I took a toothpick and poked the center of the loaf, checking to see if it came out clean. It needed to come out clean to ensure the center was fully cooked. The hardest part about baking is having to wait. I had just finished waiting for it to cook, and now it was time to wait for it to cool.

Show time. The moment you wait and wait and wait for… the tasting! Success! The bread was really good and moist. It was not as sweet as I anticipated which was most likely due to the honey shortage. But it was still really good. When I make this recipe again I will use the full amount of honey. Over all this was a simple, moist and good tasting banana bread. It tastes good with butter, a smear of peanut butter, or even just by itself!