While the list of ingredients is extensive, Banana bread is wonderfully easy to put together.
Serves: 9
Loaf tin – 9″ x 5″
Dry Ingredients:
- Plain Flour – 1¼ cups, sifted
- Wheat flour – ¼ cup, sifted
- Oats – ½ cup, roasted until fragrant (careful not to burn these)
- Baking powder – 2 teaspoons
- Baking soda – ¾ teaspoon
- Cinnamon powder – 3 teaspoons
- Grated Nutmeg – ¼ teaspoon
- Cloves – 3, pounded fine with a mortar pestle
- Sugar – ½ cup
- Jaggery powder/Raw sugar – ¼ cup
- Salt – 1 teaspoon
- Roasted Almonds – ½ cup, roughly chopped
- Roasted pumpkin and melon seeds – ¼ cup
- Black raisins – ¼ cup
Wet ingredients:
- Very ripe banana’s – 3, mashed smooth (I used a hand blender)
- Melted Butter – ½ cup
- Vanilla essence – 2 teaspoons
- Eggs – 2
- Milk – ⅓ cup
Method:
- Line a 9″ x 5″ loaf tin with baking paper. Make sure the paper sticks out beyond the edge of the tin. This gives you something to hold, to remove the bread from the tin.
- Mix all the dry ingredients into a bowl.
- In a separate larger bowl, whisk all the wet ingredients together until well combined.
- Very gently fold the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. Do not over mix the batter as this will result in a denser sticky bread.
- Bake the loaf in a preheated oven at 180°C for 1 hour or until a skewer inserted in the centre of the bread comes clean.
- Allow the bread to cool in the tin for 10 minutes before removing it from the tin and cooling it on a wire rack. Slice, top with swirls of butter and enjoy with a hot cup of filter coffee.
Notes:
- If you like a stronger taste of banana in the bread reduce the quantity of cinnamon by a teaspoon.
- Alternatives:
- to almonds: walnuts/ pecans/ pistachio
- to raisins: dried chopped apricots/ dried cranberries
- to seeds: roasted flax seeds/sunflower seeds/ sesame seeds