This recipe is from the Hummingbird Bakery book and it is honestly the best baking book I've used, the recipes always turn out brilliantly and look so professional! I would strongly suggest buying the book.
The banana loaf is such an easy recipe, anyone could do it, and its seriously good stuff!
You will need:
270g soft light brown sugar
2 eggs
200g peeled bananas, mashed
280g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
140g unsalted butter, melted
(I told you I'd do a proper recipe soon!)
You need to do this:
1. Preheat the oven to 170 degrees, for AGA lovers I put mine on the floor of the top oven with the grid shelf on the floor and put the cold shelf on the second shelf (complicated huh?)
2. Put the sugar and eggs into your mixer with the paddle attachment and beat until smooth, for those without the wonders of mixers just beat for ages with a wooden spoon until your arm is dead! Mash you bananas loads, the older they are the better because they're more squishy! It looks gross but its yummy, I promise.
3. Add the flour, baking powder, bicarb, cinnamon and ginger and mix until all incorporated, pour in your melted butter (30 seconds in the microwave) and mix until it looks a bit like this, it should be quite thick:
4. Prepare your loaf tin with butter all over and then lightly dust with flour. Don't leave any excess flour so tap the tin and tip the flour out.
5. Pour your delicious mixture into the tin and smooth it over with a spatula. Put into the oven for 1 hour or until a skewer through the middle comes out clean (I checked it at 45 mins as you can judge how much longer it needs by then)
6. Take it out of the oven and let it cool in your tin for a few minutes until transferring onto a wire cooling rack. You're supposed to wait until its completely cool to cut it into about 1 inch chunks, but we were too hungry to wait so cut it when it was still warm, this just means its slightly crumbly.
You have to make these, they're absolutely delicious and so easy! So next time you have some old bananas that you want to get rid of then make these! We;ve already eaten almost half of the loaf and its barely cool!
This weekend we travelled up to Norwich to look at UEA University for Lucy, the car journeys were LONG so we made sure we had a lot of reading material...
We saw some of the Finch family while we were there and the rest of the weekend we had a bit of a film marathon! We watched Crazy Stupid Love (not bad), Drive (very violent), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (classic!) and Chalet Girl (Ed Westwick, yum).
For Sunday roast we made a delicious Panettone and Butter Pudding for dessert, the Panettone was left over from a Christmas present so we thought we'd do something a bit different with it, our very rough recipe is here!
You will need:
A small panettone (you probably won't use it all so you can eat the rest and be transported back to Christmas!)
Couple of handfuls of raisins
4 teaspoons of dark rum
Butter spread
2 eggs
142ml double cream
225ml milk (we didn't have cream so just used 375ml full fat milk)
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp golden caster sugar
Granulated sugar (to sprinkle)
You need to do:
1. Soak the raisins in the rum for as long as you fancy (the longer you leave it the stronger it'll be) and leave to the side.
2. Cut your Panettone into thin wedges, spread with butter and cut in half to fit into your tin, keep doing this until its full, mine looked at bit like this
3. Drizzle the raisins around the dish, try not too get too much of the rum liquid in there!
4. Now get the custard going, put in your eggs (we ended up using 3 eggs but start with two and see how much it fills your dish), milk (and cream if you have it), sugar and vanilla extract and give it a good whisk, Mum really went for it!
5. In our traditional thrifty way we put the rum into the mixture too, you can decide which you'd like to do. Then use a little sieve to pour the custard all over your panettone, the sieve stops all the strange blobby bits (technical word) from the egg getting into your lovely custard.
6. Pat it all down so all of your custard gets soaked into the panettone, this is where we added our extra egg and a bit of milk but just try to sense how much custard you have coming up sides, you want about a third at least filling up your dish.
7. Ours looked a bit like this. Now sprinkle over the granulated sugar for a bit of browning on top. Put in your oven at 160 degrees for about 35 minutes until the white bits of your panettone are nice and golden.
Serve with a good dollop of ice cream, we had some homemade coconut yoghurt ice cream which went perfectly!
Today's is a very customised recipe, I promise I will post something a little less homemade and professional looking soon! Pancake Day tomorrow so expect some yummy pics of sugar and lemon crepes!
