My favorite banana bread recipe
My family, being of the classic Desi/Arab mentality, likes to buy in bulk. Which means that at the end of a week, we’ll have at least 5 almost too-ripe bananas that must be used. Solution: grab a wooden spoon, a big bowl, and start mushing.
This is my absolute favorite banana bread recipe. The basic recipe is from Joy of Cooking, but I change things around to make it my own. It’s a mix of the basic + improv of whatever I find at home that I think would be nice in it. Actually, come to think of it, the bread often turns out more like cake because I put a little more sugar and definitely more bananas than the recipe calls for. It comes out excellent every time, Alhamdulillah
Click link below for recipe
Banana Bread
- 1/3 cup shortening [I use "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" because it's lighter and immediately softened from the fridge, but you could also use normal butter. I've made it all three ways.]
- 1/3 cup white sugar
- 2/3 cup brown sugar [making it with all brown would be great too, especially a dark brown sugar]
- 2 eggs
- 1 3/4 cup flour, sifted
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- baking powder
- Teaspoon, at least, of cinnamon, mixed into the mushed bananas [add more to taste]
- Up to 4 mushed bananas [this provides moisture]
- One or two bananas sliced/diced bananas [this provides texture + you can actually tell that there are bananas in it]
- At least one cup of dried fruit, use golden raisins, normal raisins, cranberries - I usually use a mix of dried cranberries and golden raisins [more texture]
- 1/2 cup of toasted nuts, chopped [or more, depending on how much you like nuts]
Cream the butter and sugar together until well-combined. It will form kind of a paste, almost a dough. Add in the eggs, one at a time [best to beat them a little before hand].
Mash the bananas. Add in the cinnamon. Add this mush into the butter-sugar mixture and mix well.
Sift the flour [again] with the baking powder and salt. I actually add a little extra cinnamon into the sifting as well. Add in thirds to the butter-sugar-banana mixture.
Fold in extras - chopped bananas, dried fruits, nuts. I’ve added chocolate chips but that didn’t work well. About the dried fruits - the first thing I do is soak them in some light juice - white grape or apple - so they can plump while I’m mixing everything else.
Other additions
Coconut Streusel Banana Cake: One of the most yummy extras I’ve put with these muffins is a coconut topping - works great if it’s with muffins or with a bread/cake: Mix all the ingredients together as directed, pour it into a pan, and stick it in the oven. *After* you stick it in the oven: Mix the following: Sweetened coconut, a little bit of brown sugar, and a bit of cold butter in little pieces - mix it together till it’s crumbly. After about 10 minutes of baking time, spread this coconut mixture over the cake/bread/muffins. The reason you wait is because the coconut gets toasted in less time than it takes the bread to bake, so you don’t want it to burn. In fact, towards the end of the baking time, I check the oven and if the coconut looks too brown, cover the cake with foil, poke some holes, and let it keep baking until the cake itself is done.
Apple-Banana Cake: I’ve also shredded some apple in it and reduced the amount of bananas - nice change.
Apricot-Banana Cake: The Joy of Cooking cookbook also recommends adding chopped apricots. I did this once in the summer, in Virginia. It was…okay. Maybe I don’t really like apricots. The memory was nicer than the result - my mom and I got up early one morning and walked to the grocery store to buy fresh apricots. We came back and I baked the bread, and then my parents and I took my Uncle Zaheer and his family to have a picnic on the banks of the Potomac in DC.
Aishah’s Strawberry banana cake: I was making this cake once at my father-in-law’s house, and my sister-in-law, age 7, was helping me. She wanted to make it strawberry-banana, so we warmed up some strawberry Smucker’s and drizzled it on top of the cake, swirled it, and then baked it - it looked *so* beautiful in the end!