Hands up who likes bananas? Well, I feckin love them, but they've got to be ripe and I mean yellow and even yellow/green. Once they start turning brown and going soft inside, I don't like them anymore, and once they go very brown, I used to just bin them, that is until I was introduced to banana bread, so if you've around three or four bananas that are brown and you are thinking of binning them, hold on a second and read through my recipe, it is so easy and I would say between prep, bake and clean up, you can get the lot done in around 1 hour 4o minutes and until you have tasted warm or slightly hot banana bread straight from the oven, you hav not lived!! So come on, start pulling these ingredients together, most kitchens will already have most of these, well at least in Ireland anyway.
Ingredients:
210g Flour
4 ripe bananas
A large handful of Walnuts.
150g caster sugar (I used Demura sugar)
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 medium eggs
120g butter
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
Ok, let's get to it, get all of your ingredients out beside you and grab a baking tray or tin, a weighing scale and a large bowl.
STEP 1: Preheat your oven to 160 degrees Celsius.
STEP 2: Mix the flour, baking soda, salt and ground cinnamon together in a bowl.
STEP 3: Take a separate bowl and mix together the eggs, butter, 3 mashed bananas, sugar, vanilla essence and walnuts. Break the walnuts into smaller pieces with your hands.
STEP 4: Now we need to add our flour mix, do this slowly while continually stirring. Its ready for the tin now.
STEP 5: Add your mix to a baking tray. Rub butter along the inside of the tin. This is to stop it sticking at the end when you want to pop the cake out of the tray
STEP 6: Grab another banana and slice it in two and place on top of the mix in the tin. I actually had two left over, so I used two and I also added some of my walnuts along the middle.
STEP 8: We are ready to go now, just grab your tray and lob it into the pre heated oven at 160 degrees Celsius for 80 minutes.
STEP 9: Remove from the oven. Allow to cool for around 5 mins. Tip the tin and remove the baking paper.
STEP 10: Allow to cool on a tray for another 5 minutes
Bon appetite!!
You're done! Time to tuck in and enjoy the fruit of your labours! To think that those bananas could have ended up in the bin!!