cynthia’s banana bread

My grandmother is a reader, and I remember raiding her shelves during long summer afternoons at the lake house.  I also remember (and still experience!) her generosity with her reading: there were/are book-shaped packages at every birthday, Christmas, and sometimes in between.  But I think my greatest discovery was a book my Nana brought as her plane read on one visit sometime in the mid 1990s.  It was the first in Jan Karon’s Mitford series, At Home in Mitford.  I gobbled it up in a day or two and begged for more.  I adored that series (through book 5, at least)!  Looking back I must have been quite the picture: gawky teenager with terrible haircut reads voraciously about an overweight, 60-something priest in small town Carolina.  Those stories made me happy, though.

I hadn’t thought about Father Tim in years, but when I mailed myself all of the books that were under my parents’ stairs, I found a paperback set of the Mitford novels.  They’re on my shelf now, and up for discussion.  I wondered aloud at a recent party if a Mitford cookbook existed, because all I really remember at this remove are fantastic descriptions of food.  And upon checking the interwebs, my book club friends assured me that there was one.  I put it on hold, and dutifully picked it up at the library.  To be honest, I didn’t like the cookbook itself – it was badly organized.  HOWEVER.  This delicious banana bread recipe made the whole exercise worth it.  Oh my word, it’s good!  And in the land of funny coincidences, my Nana’s name is Cynthia.  So!  It’s Cynthia’s recipe, two times over.

Cynthia’s Banana Bread (modified slightly from Jan Karon’s Mitford Cookbook & Kitchen Reader)

INGREDIENTS

3/4 cup sugar

1/3 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

2 eggs, room temperature

1/4 cup plain Greek yogurt (2%)

2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

3 large, ripe bananas, mashed with a fork

2 tablespoons lemon zest (see note)

2 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup walnuts, chopped

DIRECTIONS

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.  Coat a 9” loaf pan with nonstick cooking spray and set aside.

Place the sugar and butter in the bowl of an electric mixer and cream until light and fluffy.  Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Add the yogurt, lemon juice, bananas and lemon zest and beat well.  Sift the flour, baking soda, and salt into a medium bowl.  Add the dry ingredients to the banana mixture in two batches, and stir until just blended.  Add the walnuts and mix again until just incorporated.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan, smooth the top, and bake for 55 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the bread comes out fairly clean.  Don’t over bake!  Cool in the pan on a rack for 5 minutes, then invert onto the rack to cool completely.

Note: The Mitford Cookbook introduced instructions for zesting a lemon unlike any that I have ever tried.  Using a vegetable peeler, peel the colored part of the peel and leave the bitter white pith alone.  Once you have a small pile of lemon peels, mince and measure.  There’s your zest! Two tablespoons ended up being the zest of one large lemon when done in this manner.

This. Banana bread.  Happy Easter to ME!  I don’t ever recall wanting to eat banana bread batter by the spoonful before… but this recipe did it.  I won’t ever switch back to anything else, because, YEAH.  Holy yum.

Recommended for: everyone.  It’s delicious.

Interested in other food-related posts?  Check out Beth Fish Reads' Weekend Cooking!

night baker strikes again! witnesses say banana bread target

Whenever I let bananas get a little too ripe, I stick them in the freezer and wait for an opportune moment to make banana bread. Banana bread is definitely one of my ‘specialties’ (if someone who bakes for one can be said to have specialties), and I’ve mostly used The Joy of Cooking’s quick bread recipe in the past. However, I noticed the last time I baked it that it didn’t taste especially banana-y (made up word alert!). So when the urge to late-night bake struck in the early hours and I also conveniently found four frozen bananas in my fridge, I decided to go hunting for a new, improved banana bread recipe. As we all know, the internet is our friend, so I browsed on a couple of cooking sites until I came upon a recipe that looked promising. Of course, I did make some modifications, but as long as it turns out all right, you’re allowed to do that. So say I, master of my own kitchen. Or perhaps, mistress thereof.

Banana Bread

INGREDIENTS

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup butter

3/4 cup brown sugar (I used white because I’m fresh out of brown)

2 eggs, beaten

2 1/3 cups mashed overripe bananas (4 or 5 should do the trick)

PERSONALIZATION (because life needs spicing up sometimes)

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon (approximate) ‘Pumpkin Pie Spice’

(optional) 1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

DIRECTIONS

Preheat oven to 350°F (I wanted a moist loaf, so I lowered the temperature to 330°F, and baked it longer). Lightly grease a 9x5 or 8x4 inch loaf pan.

In a large bowl, combine flour, baking soda, salt and spices. In a separate bowl, cream together butter and sugar. Stir in eggs, vanilla and mashed bananas until well blended. Add banana mixture to flour mixture; stir only enough to moisten. Pour batter into prepared loaf pan.

Bake in preheated oven for an hour and ten minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into center of the loaf comes out clean. Let bread cool in pan for 10 minutes, and then turn out onto a wire rack (I don’t have a wire rack, so it just stays in the pan for a while…no ill effects noted).

Hold on, I’m going to do a taste test…

Oh, it’s good. Very moist. But delicious nonetheless. Not the crumbling kind, and very banana-y as hoped for. Now go on…make some yourself!