Wednesday, March 25, 2009

The Big Banana Bread Bake Off #1

Cake #1 - Banana and Sultana Bread - minus the sultanas


The Pictures.


The Recipe
Banana and Sultana Bread
2 C SR Flour
1 tsp bicarb soda
pinch of salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 C caster sugar
(3/4 cup sultanas)
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 C milk
1 C mashed banana (2 large)

Preheat oven to 180C
Line a loaf pan 23 x 13 cm with baking paper
Sift flour, bicarb, salt and cinnamon into a large bowl
Stir in sugar (and sultanas)
Combine eggs,milk and bananas in a large jug
Whisk with a fork until well combined
Using a large metal spoon, stir egg mixture into the dry ingredients until well combined
Pour mixture into loaf tin
Bake for 40 - 45 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.
Cool in pan for 10 minutes
Turn onto a wire rack to cool completely
Slice and serve lightly buttered or toasted.

The Comments
This recipes needed an extra 5 minutes (Total baking time 50mins)
The top was hard and shiny and I had trouble getting the skewer into the cake.
When tested the cake appeared to be cooked apart from a bottom layer.
I gave it an extra five minutes, retested it and it appeared fine
When cut it was perfect looking inside.
Unfortunately when tasted it was chewy and tasteless, even when eaten warm.
It was quite 'spongy' and gel like and the crust was chewy.
There was very little banana flavour.
It was nicer with butter, but definitely bread like
The next day it was still spongy feeling in the mouth, even when buttered.
It toasted nicely, was crusty but still not very flavoursome and still retained that spongy texture.

The Rating
This is hard to rate as it is the first cake. However, based on what I imagine the perfect Banana Bread to be, this version is awarded 4/10.

Monday, March 23, 2009

A Quick Catch Up

Hello everyone,
It has been quite some time since I have written to you.

A number of things:
1. I'd like to be losing a bit of weight so trying to do less cooking and more exercise.
2. As some of you may know we have purchased some land to start a small farm.
http://howtobuildafarm.blogspot.com/
You can keep tabs on us here.

I have taken my next step in my food obsession and I'm going to grow my own and grow some so that you too can eat real, free range food, as nature intended. We will build a commercial kitchen so I can use my own fruits, vegetables and herbs to make some interesting products, as well as process the pork from the pigs we plan to free range.

I will be blogging some recipes here in the next few days.
I am starting The Big Banana Bread Bake Off.

A discussion about the perfect banana bread prompted a look through my cook books to discover over 50 recipes for banana bread. I have selected 12 as representing most styles. I will bake each recipe as it is published, taste it, comment, toast it the next morning, comment and then freeze some and invite some friends over for a taste test comparison. Then we should be able to find the Perfect Banana Bread.
Stay tuned.