Banana Bread for Lunchboxes

We have six bunches of bananas on (there’s a reason Coffs is the home of the Big Banana!) – three Cavendish and three Ladyfinger. We also have two of a Filipino variety that have yet to fruit. They are supposed to be a dwarf, cooking variety so they may be Saging Mondo? Climate change is a real incentive to diversify from the European cuisine that is so familiar to we white Australians. I can see learning to cook with green, cooking bananas in my future.

Meanwhile though, I have a freezer full of ripe Cavs, even after a lot of them went to the African neighbours as green bananas and the kids had banana icecream in cones as an after school snack just about every summer afternoon. Luckily, my grandkids are as boring with their favourite lunchbox recess baking as they are with their pita bread filling. I did a whole year once of Muesli Bar Challenge, but they want banana bread every day.

Right. Ok then. This is my banana bread recipe.

The Recipe:

1. Oven on to heat up to medium, around 180°C.
2. Peel 5 medium sized Cavendish bananas. You can use frozen or fresh bananas. I freeze bananas in their skin, just thrown loose as is into the freezer. To use them, I chop them into quarters, then into halves lengthways. If they thaw for just a couple of minutes, it is easy to pry the skin off (though a butter knife is handy to avoid frozen fingers).
3. Crack and chop a cup of walnut or pecan pieces. (If school has a no-nut policy, you can leave them out).
4. 125 grams of butter into a pot to melt. (In spring, when I have an egg glut, I substitute half the butter for an extra egg).
5. Into a mixing bowl:
   • 2 eggs (or three if you are substituting for half the butter – see above)
   • ½ cup of brown sugar (or less – bananas are sweet – it doesn’t need much sugar).
   • 1 teaspoon vanilla essence (or a scraping of real vanilla pod if you are lucky enough to have some real PNG vanilla – thank you Lana!)
   • teaspoon cinnamon
   • good pinch of bicarb
6. Beat with an egg beater till well combined.
7. Then add the banana pieces to the mix, along with the warm melted butter, and beat with the egg beater till the banana is broken up but not smooth. This takes a little more beating with the semi-frozen banana pieces, but with fresh banana you have to be careful not to overdo it. You want little pieces of banana in banana bread, not banana puree.
8. Stir in the walnut pieces, along with 2½ cups of self raising flour. I use wholemeal but if you want a lighter texture you can make all or part of it unbleached self-raising flour. If you make cakes a bit, you will notice that it is thicker than a normal cake mix.
9. It doesn’t pour, so you’ll have to scrape the mix into a greased loaf tin with enough room for it to rise by about 50%. Smooth the top with a spatula. Bake for around 30 to 40 minutes, till it feels firm and a skewer comes out clean.

This makes a big loaf. I halve it and freeze it in two halves. Thawed out on a Monday, half a loaf is enough for recess for two kids for the week. Unless one of those kids is a boy approaching puberty. Then it is likely to be gone by Monday afternoon.