Ian Thomson

One of the things I enjoy doing in my spare time is cooking and my favourite type of cooking is baking. And here is one of my favourite recipes. It is for Banana bread and, having tried and adapted a few recipes, I firmly believe this latest result to be the best.

I make this whenever I find that I have too many bananas around and some are becoming over-ripe. It is a fabulous way of using these rather than wasting them. So much so, that I often deliberately buy too many bananas!

Some of the reasons I particularly like this recipe are:

• It’s flexible - you don’t need to get the quantities right - close is good enough
• It’s easy - basically, all you do is bung everything together and stir - you don’t even use a mixer
• It’s quick - it can be in the oven in 10 minutes
• It doesn’t require a big clean up afterwards - so I don’t get into trouble for leaving a big mess!
• And, of course, the best reason of the lot - it tastes fantastic!

OK, so the ingredients are:

• 5 or 6 over-ripe bananas
• 125g butter
• 250g sugar
• 2 x eggs
• 1 x teaspoon vanilla extract (or 2 of vanilla essence)
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 350g self-raising flour

Method:

1. Pre-heat oven to 170 degrees C
2. Melt butter (on the hob on low or put into a bowl and zapped in the microwave on low - just melted, not boiled!)
3. While it is melting, peel the bananas and bung them into a large bowl
4. Pour the melted butter into the bowl and mix - breaking the bananas down into small chunks as you do it. You can keep going until you get pulp if you like but personally I like to find banana bits in the banana bread
5. Add the sugar, eggs, vanilla extract and salt and mix
6. Add the flour and mix again
7. Pour into a loaf tin. You can butter this but my preference is to line it with baking paper - it’s easier to get out when cooked
8. Bung into oven
9. It is ready when a knife comes out clean - usually after about 1¼ hours.
10. Cool on a rack - try to wait for it to cool - it slices easier!
11. Fabulous sliced, toasted and buttered
12. Would probably work with walnuts added but I’m not a huge walnut fan so haven’t tried it.

So, let me know what you think. Also, I’d love to hear other suggestions of good recipes for over-ripe bananas if you have them - sometimes even I can have too much banana bread in the house!

Ian