I also made it a priority to get this recipe done before the weekend. Not because I will be having a houseful of guests like Summer, but because I will BE one of Summer's household guests! :DNormally, I am a boxed banana bread girl - Pilsbury's box to be exact. From someone who bakes as much as possible from scratch, this could be construed as my dirty little secret. :) Thing is, I can never seem to time it quite right with the bananas to make it from scratch. So this recipe was sort of a big deal for me.
I pretty much followed the recipe to the letter. The only minor deviations I had were forgetting to lightly whip the eggs before adding them to the batter and omitting the optional walnuts. I am generally not a fan of nuts in most cookies and breads. I did, however, add the optional mini chocolate chips. The ingredients came together pretty nicely and it wasn't long before I had it in the oven. One a side note, one thing I've been really struggling with in this project (Already? Yes, I know.) is remembering the author's instruction to bring the eggs to room temp. I am very used to doing this for butter, but very rarely do I come across recipes suggesting the same for eggs! As usual, I forgot about it with this recipe. Fortunately, the author mentions a short cut for this whereby you can soak the eggs in very warm water for 10 minutes to achieve the same effect. Woo hoo! That certainly saved me some time and frustration.
About 30 minutes into the baking cycle, my mouth started to water from how good it smelled!! Overall, it took just a few minutes shy of an hour to finish baking. This bread baked much smoother than the pound cake - everything was baked thru nicely.
I opted to wait until after dinner to taste test it with B. Overall, it tasted pretty good. I did notice it was a little spongy in texture. I am not sure if this is normal for banana bread from scratch, or if it was unique to this recipe. I also wish I didn't add the chocolate chips. Normally I love all things chocolate chip - pancakes, bagels, cookies. But for making this for the first time, I should have omitted them. I think I will try this recipe again in the future and see how it tastes without the chips. I might also be brave enough now to try other banana bread recipes!
I will have to give you my stand by banana bread recipe. I promise it's easy. I can understand having trouble timing with the bananas, but honestly, if you throw bananas in the freezer, they just turn black. You just need to thaw before using.
ReplyDeleteI can't wait to see you and talk about baking!!!!