Banana baking

Our son has a habit of pointing at things, saying what they are, suggesting he wants it, then deciding he doesn’t want it. Especially with food. We therefore moved the fruit bowl off the kitchen table and onto a shelf so that we wouldn’t keep opening bananas so he could have one bite and then we’d put the rest in the freezer. The disadvantage of this is we forget about our fruit and all of a sudden we have to use it up quickly.

So yesterday I decided to make two banana breads to use up our rather brown bananas – one for eating this week, one to put in the freezer. I use a Mary Berry recipe from one of our cake recipe books, but of course I struggle to follow a recipe to the ‘T’ so I alter it slightly. I don’t use any honey as we prefer it to be more cake than bread, and it seems a waste of my parents’ honey. Sometimes I add some chopped chocolate to the mixture if we have any lying around from previous bakes. And I think the original recipe includes some sort of sugar icing, which again I omit. So basically I make banana cake, I just call it banana bread.

I’m one of those people who can eat chocolate spread from the jar. Or spread it on digestive biscuits. Or marshmallows. Or the usual, toast. Nutella (chocolate and hazelnut spread) is a fairly recent addition to our baking cupboard but I can’t remember why we bought it. Perhaps it was because we discovered it was Italian and therefore it is amazing.

I recently read somewhere online about adding Nutella to banana bread. Sounds so yummy! I have no idea where I read it but I remembered the basic idea: melt some Nutella in the microwave, put half the banana bread mixture in your tin, spread the Nutella over the mixture, add the rest of the mixture. So that’s what I did. I used my normal recipe and added Nutella. I actually ran out of Nutella and had to open our Sainsbury’s version. Interestingly, the Sainsbury’s version tastes nuttier.

Banana and Nutella bread

And the verdict is: it’s very nice warm from the oven! And it’s also nice cold. I like that the Nutella made a sort of smiley mouth shape even though it was all level when it went in the oven. I wonder if swirling it a bit when all the cake mixture is in the tin might make it spread a bit more or make a funkier pattern. Maybe next time. There are all those bananas in the freezer, after all.

Closing in on the big 3-0 with more baking

I recently took another step towards turning 30. I’m now 28. I know, I know, still another two years to go. I could hardly believe it the other day when someone asked me how long I’ve been playing the piano and I could say ‘about 20 years’. How on earth am I able to say that?!

Anyway, my birthday fell quite nicely in the middle of hubby’s two weeks off work, so we took a trip to the seaside. I love going to the beach and having fish and chips and gelato. I think it’s because we don’t go to the beach very often. And it was lovely relaxing and watching the boys dig in the sand and splash in the sea. Then we stayed up late watching… You’ve Got Mail. As it was my birthday, I got to choose the film and it makes me smile every time. Hubby had made me chocolate fudge cake for my birthday cake too, so I had a week off baking… kind of.

During the last couple of weeks I have made: light wholemeal bread, rustic bread, rye bread (which our son really likes!) and I tried making up my own version of the sunflower seed spelt bread that I mentioned in a previous post. It wasn’t quite the same, but it still worked. In addition to these, I have made pizza dough to be cooked on a pizza stone in our BBQ, and pizza scrolls in the slow cooker.

Pizza on the BBQ

Pizza scrolls

 

 

 

Rustic bread

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is all because hubby was off work so I had a bit more time to bake. And yet I didn’t bake anything sweet until this Sunday! I made this Raspberry Bakewell Cake to use up some raspberries. And this weekend I plan to make that yummy mango and lime cake as I finally found some big cake tin liners in Poundland.

Actually I made some ice cream, so not baking but it is sweet. I used this recipe from the BBC Food website as we had some bananas in the freezer (when our son decides he only wants half a banana and we don’t fancy eating the other half at that moment, I put the other half in the freezer to use for banana bread or something at a later date) and some buttermilk in the fridge for a recipe I didn’t get round to making. It worked a treat so I made some raspberry ice cream and some mango ‘instant’ ice cream using frozen fruit we already had and put them in the freezer for another day. One note – mango and vanilla extract do not work in this recipe. Thankfully, hubby is happy to eat it up but I think it tastes horrible!

Home made bread

Making bread in my (hubby’s) slow cooker is my latest craze. I have made bread a few times before, but due to the time it takes to knead and leaving it to rise and remembering to do the next steps, it was only as a fun thing to do on a weekend. Since then I have watched numerous episodes of The Great British Bake Off and Paul Hollywood spin-offs to know how to knead and stretch dough correctly, but I still wasn’t inspired to actually do it.

Until now. So far in the slow cooker I have made two loaves of bread. The first was a wholemeal loaf. It turned out fine but went dry quite quickly. Hubby said that’s what happens with homemade bread because it doesn’t have all the preservatives in it. So if I want to make bread for my family, I’m going to need to make it about every 2-3 days.

And I want to make bread for my family. Aside from knowing what is actually in the bread, it brings me such joy to see them eating something I have made that I never really thought I would make. On Saturday our lunch was homemade toasted soldiers with boiled egg and I couldn’t help but smile as my boys tucked in!

We opted not to put a bread maker on our wedding gift list because we didn’t think we’d use it. Now I wonder if we would have. My father-in-law makes bread regularly in his bread maker, so after the success of my first loaf I called him to ask for his advice on different types of flour. After the initial shock of my being able to make bread in the slow cooker (he was excited about the prospect of trying to make rye bread in their slow cooker), he gave me advice on spelt flour, Canadian flour, and so on. So I dutifully went out and bought various types of flour.

Flour Power

The second loaf I made was my father-in-law’s spelt loaf (below). I made it on Sunday evening and it is yummy! When it had finished cooking and on the rack cooling, I actually skipped excitedly back to the living room to tell hubby it was done. There is a loaf of sliced bread in the freezer because no doubt a loaf will go wrong, this fad will end or I won’t have time to make bread and we’ll run out. I hope it’s not a fad and I get excited every time I successfully make a loaf of bread.

Spelt loaf

I think loaf number 3 will be a plain loaf to get us to the end of the week and loaf number 4 will be a ciabatta disaster. I bought two ciabatta/focaccia packets which were reduced to 29p each thinking I could give it a go in the slow cooker. I just have a feeling it won’t work. I’ll let you know!