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Last Saturday afternoon Adam and I spent a few hours setting it up: tying parsley into the letter B and carrots into an R and generally making a small mess of his kitchen.
Adam does not bake, ergo, Adam does not have a sifter... so I used this "rubbing my hands together" technique over the stencils that he made (he might not make muffins but the boy can make signs, I tell you what.) Yes, it was very technical. A technical... technique. Mm hm. Well anyway, we messed about with stencils and lighting and also we tried this spoon "stencil," too:
Which ended up looking like this when we picked up the spoon:
I thought that made the whole thing too, well, stencily. What do you think? After some back and forth and re-setting the whole shebang three or four times, I picked the handwritten design you see at the top of the page. But THEN I had leftover fruit and vegetables, and what's a girl to do with three past-their-prime bananas?
Ok, they don't look so bad in this photo but I KNOW I won't eat them in the next two days, so banana bread it was. I smushed several recipes together, and here's what I came up with.
Bruno's Banana Bread
I'm not a huge fan of nuts in my banana bread, but if you wanted to add 1/2 cup of toasted walnut pieces, stir them in with the flour at the end. You could also use all brown sugar, but I ran out, so I made up the difference with white.
3-4 ripe to very ripe bananas
5 tbsp unsalted butter, very soft or melted and cooled slightly
1 large egg
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup all purpose flour
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F, and butter a loaf pan.
Mash the bananas roughly in a medium bowl with a fork or potato-masher. Add the very soft or melted butter and the sugar, beat with an electric mixer until blended. [Note: I like to blend the bananas; I feel like it lightens the crumb of the bread, but by all means feel free to mash with a fork only and add to the mix with the flour.]
Add the egg, vanilla extract, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and baking soda, mix to blend. Add the flour and stir with a wooden spoon until just blended.
Pour batter (it is quite gloopy) into loaf pan and bake for 50 minutes to one hour until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack in pan ten minutes, then remove from pan and cool completely.
I like this banana bread with peanut butter for breakfast, or a la mode for dessert!
Made the house smell delicious. Perfect for couch moving!
ReplyDelete1. I had no idea you had a blog devoted to cooking. I have considered doing something similar but know I would never end up uploading pictures and it would be exceptionally boring. I am very impressed.
ReplyDelete2. Let's cook something together. That is in no way innuendo, I really mean I want to make a meal of food with you.
3. Your banner/sign/edible arrangement is beyond impressive
I LOVE the new banner — easily one of the best food blog banners around!
ReplyDeleteThanks, guys! Glad you like it. Jer, yes - cooking project ASAP.
ReplyDeleteI love the banner! It looks better than most professional websites' banners. I think I'm going to write an entry about cool Adriennes who are bloggers--I know three already. BTW I linked to you the other day, here: http://adrienne.blog.com/3497167/
ReplyDeleteAnd don't laugh at my cupcake pic; the girls destroyed most of them before I could get one, so I stole that from Flickr :P
Remind me to pass you my mom's banana bread recipe. It's nut-free, and also serves as Tyler crack, in case you needed bait to trap Tyler in a box balanced on a stick.
ReplyDelete"Tyler Crack" Banana Bread:
ReplyDelete2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
3 mashed bananas
1 egg, beaten
1/4 cup shortening
1 cup nuts (optional)
Mash the bananas and add the egg and shortening, stirring until combined. In a separate bowl, mix the dry ingredients. Add the dry mixture to the wet, and stir until moistened. That's it.
My mother uses 2 half-sized loaf pans, and bakes it at 300 for 30 minutes. In a regular loaf pan, it takes up to an hour before a knife will test clean in the center. I don't have half-sized loaf pans, but I prefer this bread in them; the shorter baking time makes the bread more moist and soft, and the surface-are-to-volume-ratio trick means you have more of that gooey-sticky top per slice.