Banana bread is an oldie, but very much a goodie! You can add your style to the cake/bread by adding walnuts, dried fruit or chocolate. As well as it being a family favourite it's also one of our favourites because it's all about wasting less.
We always find that we have one banana that never quite gets eaten in it's prime, and sits in the fruit bowl as everyone eats around it. When you see a banana like that chop it with the skin on and stick it in a container in the freezer. Yes you read correctly, with the SKIN ON!
Banana skin is full of nutrients, B12, B6 and magnesium are just a few. We've been using frozen chopped banana with skin on in smoothies for years, so when it came to making banana bread it was obvious that I just needed to use my stash in the freezer.
There is of course one problem, you need them soft to be able to mash them or have a very good food processor to make them mushy. We use our smoothie maker with a little added liquid (milk or a milk alternative is good) to get the right consistency before adding in the other ingredients. If you don't have a powerful food processor to hand you could just take your bananas out of the freezer an hour or two before you start baking.
Top tip that we would give is that you can add a little bit here and there of what you have, rather than going out to buy all new ingredients. For example you could replace your egg with apple puree if you're vegan or are out of eggs. It's also another way you can save old fruit from just going in the bin, chop up your apples when they're starting to look a bit old and gently cook them down until they're very soft, allow them to cool and then place them in an ice cube tray to get little cubes, great for replacing eggs in recipes or popping into your porridge in the morning. For every egg that the recipe asks for you can use 30g of apple puree. Easy!
Banana bread has been the go to recipe for lockdown, but today we thought we'd include a little chocolate just to add that little bit of extra scrumptiousness!
You can add dark or milk chocolate and we simply buy a bar of chocolate and use a knife to chop it into all different sized shards. We love it because it means you occasionaly come across an extra large piece of melted chocolate in your banana bread. Yum.
Added Bonus: Dark 75% - 85% chocolate is actually good for you, in blance with eveything else of course. Studies show that a little bit every now and then will provide you with a good range of minerals, it has antioxident properties and well quite frankly we think it's good for our mental health too!
Ingredients
3 ripe bananas (or equivalent chopped banana with skin)
75g melted butter or vegan butter
100g light unrefined caster sugar
1 egg (or 30g apple puree)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp baking soda
pinch of salt
185g plain flour (we used gluten free plain flour)
1 bar of chocolate (dark or milk, and as big or small as you like!)
Method
Preheat oven to 180 degrees
In a bowl mash the bananas, if using from frozen place the bananas in a blender with a dash of milk or milk alternative until they have gone down to a thick mushy consistency. Add the melted butter to the mashed bananas and mix thoroughly.
Add the sugar, egg (or apple puree), vanilla, baking soda, salt and flour and stir until fully combined and you have a smooth batter.
Fold in the chocolate shards and pour the batter into a greased loaf tin. you can always decorate your cake with a sliced banana on top.
Bake in the oven for 50 minutes - we always check our bakes at around 35minutes.
Leave it to cool before eating. Enjoy!