Easy Banana Bread

 

This is one of the first dairy, egg and nut free bakes I made and whenever I have any overripe bananas hanging around, I rustle one of these up. It goes down a storm and people don’t even notice that it’s dairy and egg free – and it’s so easy the kids love helping to make it.

 

I have to admit to having a couple of disasters with this even after making it for years, resulting in a loaf which was dense and doughy in the middle no matter how long I cooked it for… I couldn’t understand what was going wrong and thought I had lost my baking mojo – but I eventually figured out the reasons:
i) Too much liquid. I let my bananas hang around for a bit too long to the point that they were not only soft, but really, really quite squishy. They had turned into an almost purée-like consistency inside and the resulting cake mixture was too runny. This does not make a good cake.
ii) MASH your bananas but DO NOT blend! For a quick shortcut I decided to stick them into my blender for a few seconds, which resulted in a liquid purée and yet again too runny a cake mixture. Texture in your bananas are definitely required.
iii) Don’t use baking powder that has expired (duh). While I was scratching my head trying to figure out why my cake didn’t appear to rise very much, I decided to check the expiry date and lo and behold, it was nearly a year out of date! Binning it and using a new one fixed that.

Ingredients

225g Plain Flour and
3 tsps Baking Powder
OR
225g Self Raising Flour and
2 tsps Baking Powder

100g Dark Brown Sugar
3 Medium Overripe Bananas (or 2 Large)
75g Vegetable Oil
50g Raisins
1 tsp Vanilla Essence

Method

1. Preheat Oven to 200C/190C Fan. Peel the bananas and mash.
2. If using dark brown sugar, make sure to remove any lumps beforehand. Mix well with the bananas, oil and vanilla essence.
3. Sift the flour and baking powder, then fold into the wet mixture and stir in the raisins.
4. Bake in a greased and lined 500g loaf tin for approximately 1 hour. Check if the loaf is browning too quickly halfway through cooking and cover with foil if it is.
5. Once cooked allow to cool in the tin for 10-15 minutes before turning out on a cooling rack.