This week I’m going to bake the Best Banana Bread Ever! I have a story behind all this but let me go ahead and give you the recipe because my biggest pet peeve about baking/cooking blogs is they go on and on about the recipe or their story and the recipe isn’t until the very end!
Best Banana Bread Ever:
Makes 2 loaves Bake Time: 1 hour & 10 minutes
4 medium ripe bananas 1 cup of oil
4 eggs 2/3 cup of buttermilk*
3 ½ cups of flour 2 teaspoons of baking soda
1 ½ cups of sugar 2 teaspoon of vanilla
1 cup of chopped pecans (optional) 1 teaspoon salt
Preheat the oven at 325° and grease two loaf pans. In a large bowl mash the bananas. Next, combine all the ingredients in the order listed. The batter should be lumpy. Pour into the two loaf pans and bake for approximately 1 hour and 10 minutes or until golden brown.
*To make your own buttermilk, put ½ teaspoon of vinegar in a measuring cup and add 2/3 cup of milk.
My Gram started teaching me to bake when I was only 2 years old. I would stir whatever was in the bowl. When I got a little older, I would pour the ingredients. A few years older, I would measure. And so on until one day I was baking all on my own. It’s a skill I’ve always been thankful for. Being able to bake came in handy throughout high school and since then. It helped me nab my husband?
It has also been an incredible way for me to cope with the overwhelming parts of life. I know people who say baking is what causes them stress, but for me it brings relief. There’s a sense of order. Cooking has a lot of art to it. Add a dash of this, a sprinkle of that and you can get the most delicious dish you’ve ever created! Baking is more like chemistry. It doesn’t mean there isn’t room for experimentation, but the slightest change could be disastrous for the taste or texture of your baked good. Baking is calming. It allows my mind to put all it’s focus on the task at hand and when all the hard work is finished there’s a sweet treat to enjoy!
I will always be grateful for my Gram teaching me how to bake. I don’t know what I would do without it! It is a skill I plan on passing down to my own children when the time comes. Unfortunately, this recipe did not come from my Gram’s recipe book (I don’t know if I’m allowed to share those). I got this recipe from my high school math teacher who also enjoyed baking. Whenever my whole class earned A’s on our tests, she would make us banana bread! It was a great motivator and an even greater reward!
Tips for new bakers:
*The placement of the oven rack will change how long the item needs to bake. The higher the rack the faster it will bake. The lower the rack the slower it will bake. I usually bake my bread with the oven rack in the middle.
*If you want to bake the bread faster you can put the rack on the highest level but check the bread at 30 minutes by poking the middle with either a toothpick or a fork. If it comes out clean it’s ready. If it comes out sticky leave it in for another 10 minutes and check again. If it comes out crumbly leave it in for another 5 minutes and check again.
*Not all ovens are created equal. The oven in my apartment bakes much faster than the one in my parents’ house. I shorten the bake time at my apartment.
*If you have bananas that have reached a point where you won’t eat them make some banana bread, so you don’t waste them! Generally, the browner the better!
*You can experiment with the sugar. My teacher’s original recipe called for THREE CUPS of sugar, yikes! That sounded like way too much sugar for me, so I cut back half a cup every time I baked the bread. One cup wasn’t quite sweet enough for my taste, so I settled with one and a half cups.
*To make the bread dairy free substitute regular milk with almond milk (or any other milk of your choice). I use almond milk and the bread still turns out great!
The lighting in my apartment is awful and the pictures do not do this bread justice! It smells amazing, looks amazing and most importantly tastes amazing! I hope you enjoy this favorite recipe of mine. Let me know in the comments below if you try it out for yourself!
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