Lately one of my ‘obsessions’ has been My Kitchen Rules Australia. It’s a cooking competition, where pairs of home cooks compete against each other. In every season I have my favourite pairs and in season 5 one of my favourites where Cathy and Anna. This mother and daughter had a great cooking style and I practically loved all of their dishes.
One of those dishes was a banana bread witch honey ricotta. As I have always wanted to bake banana bread, I was convinced that they had the perfect recipe for me. I looked it up and it was just amazingly good! It is perfectly moist, a but dense and has a nice crunch because of the nuts.
Below I am giving you all the directions to make it yourself. It’s still their recipe, but I changed a few thinks, to my liking.
Because I couldn’t find a real loaf tin, my bread came out round. It didn’t affect the taste, but it did affect a bit the credibility of the name. So lets call it a banana bread cake if that sounds okay for you?
You could substitute the sugar by stevia and the flour by any other healthier option. But I really wanted to keep it ‘real’. I feel that all the overthinking of finding new and healthier ingredients makes us forget about the beauty of the original ingredients. Something I also tend to do, but I recommend you to not do it with this recipe. It’s absolutely delicious how it is.
TIPS:
Use overripe bananas, so you really get that ‘banana-taste’
Make sure the milk and butter aren’t to hot, so your eggs don’t curdle
Ingredients you’ll need:
3 overripe bananas, already pealed and mashed
2 eggs, lightly beaten
½ tsp of baking powder
75 dark brown sugar
¼ tsp of salt
100 grams of dates, cut into pieces
100 grams of pecans/walnuts, cut into pieces
185 ml of milk
1 and ½ tsp of vanilla
300 grams of self-raising flour
125 grams of butter
Instructions
Preheat the oven to a 180 degrees (fan).
Choose the baking tin you want to use. Butter and flour it so your bread won’t stick to it.
Mix in a large bowl the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar.
Stir in the dates and nuts.
Heat up 60 ml of the milk and all the butter, until the butters has dissolved. The milk shouldn’t be boiling! Add the remaining milk to cool it down.
Now stir in the mashed bananas and the eggs. Mix well.
Add this wet mixture to the flour mixture and combine.
Bake for about half an hour. This baking time worked for me perfectly, but if you aren’t sure just put a tooth pick in the middle of the bread. If it comes out clean, your banana bread is ready!
Leave it to chill in to thin for 5-10 minutes before you take it out.
Let cool and enjoy!