Banana Nut Bread
“A great banana bread made without eggs”
One day I arrived home from work and felt like baking something sweet to surprise my wife when she came home. I didn’t have a lot in the house in the way of sweets. I started flipping through the “sweet recipe” scrapbooks I had made from my grandmothers recipes. I looked through the one with cakes and decided I just didn’t have that much time to bake and frost a cake. I looked through the random desserts, nothing jumped out at me. Then came the cookie book and again I had none of the ingredients in the house. As I was closing that scrapbook I looked over and saw 3 very ripe bananas. Now I’m very particular about the bananas I eat. My wife gives me a hard time because I only like bananas that have a little green and absolutely NO brown on them at all. These bananas had been on my counter for a while and were long past the point of peeling and eating. So it hit me, BANANA NUT BREAD!!!!!
It would be easy, I had all the ingredients, and it is one of my wife’s favorites. As you can tell I try to be a good husband when I can. I had made a scrapbook for breads, as the pages turned there was no banana nut bread recipe. I thought how can that be, their has to be at least one recipe. I started to turn each page slowly and look closer at each recipe and finally found a very faded, small and hard to read recipe for what looked like banana nut bread.
I looked at it and decided I would give it a try. So I gathered all the ingredient and started. I know my grandmother would make this recipe with walnuts because that was what she loved to bake with and eat. I’m not a big fan of walnuts, for really no particular reason, I just prefer pecans. Any kind of nuts would work great in this recipe so feel free to use your favorite.
As I started a couple thing stood out as strange in the recipe. First off there were no instructions other than the ingredient list and how long to bake it for. Then I noticed that it called for only 1 tbsp of shorting which seemed like an extremely small amount of fat in the recipe. I’m used to making sweet breads with at least one stick of butter. I wanted to try and stay true to the recipe as much as possible, so I decided to increase the shortening to 2 tbsp. Then there was no salt, no spices and no vanilla. I added a pinch of salt, some fresh grated nutmeg, and a splash of vanilla extract.
I mixed the ingredients like I normally would for a recipe like this and poured into a greased loaf pan. Into the oven it went. Then all of a sudden, the light bulb went off, I realized there was an important ingredient missing!!!!! I double checked the recipe and realized I didn’t forget the eggs, it wasn’t written in the ingredients list. I thought it has to be a mistake that grandma must have forgotten to write it down. It was to late to do anything about it so I waited patiently while the bread bake. When the timer went off I tested it with a toothpick and removed it from the oven to cool.
The bread looked like every other recipe for banana nut bread. However, I was really anxious to see what the inside looked like, after all I have seen and eaten some beautiful food that tasted terrible. When the loaf was sliced, I was extremely surprised, it looked great! After dinner my wife had a piece and loved it, she said it tasted great. I still to this day have a hard time understanding why this recipe works so well with out eggs and such a small amount of fat but it does. I guess I shouldn’t worry about it and just enjoy the simplicity of this recipe.
Enjoy!!!!!
Mash bananas
Combine dry ingredients
mix sugar and shortening
add dry ingredients and bananas
fold in vanilla and pecans
pour into prepared pan
bake until golden brown!!!!
Ingredients
- 1 Cup sugar
- 2 Tbsp Shortening
- 3 Medium ripe bananas (Mashed)
- 2 Cups all purpose flour (sifted)
- 1/2 tsp Baking powder
- 1 tsp Baking soda
- Pinch of salt
- 1/4 Cup Buttermilk
- 3/4 Cup Pecans (chopped)
- Pinch Nutmeg (freshly grated if possible)
- Vanilla extract
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees
- Grease and flour a 9x5 inch loaf pan
- Mix Sugar & Shortening in bowl until well combined
- Combine dry ingredients and whisk together
- Add bananas to sugar mixture
- Mix to combine
- Add dry ingredients & combine
- Add milk stir to combine
- Fold in vanilla and pecans
- Pour into prepared pan
- Bake 350 degrees for 55 to 60 minutes until toothpick comes out of middle clean.
- Cool before serving
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