Banana Bread, Take 5 or 6 or Possibly 7!!!

I love good banana bread and banana cake. It's like a thing with me, a flaw in my stars, to be this in love with banana products. Banana cream pie??? Oh be still my heart!

I found a great banana cake recipe online and I share it with anyone who mentions a love for banana cake! You'll find it here, and it's the best I've ever had. We like it with whipped cream frosting, not the cream cheese frosting, and I never have a bad thing to say about cream cheese frosting!

So back to banana bread. Beth had a clutch of Very Old Bananas. She wanted something baked. Now you'd think a mother of three could handle this, but she's expecting baby #4, a little girl to add to THREE BOYS, so we cut her slack. If she wants banana bread, we can make that our kitchen science lesson!  So we start with peeling and smushing the bananas. GREAT FUN! Notice that Elijah is eyeing the black banana with some reluctance!

And then we move to assembly:

Here's the recipe as found on Food.com, and it deserves every one of the 5 stars it's been given!

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten
4 bananas, smushed completely
1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

3/4 cup miniature chocolate chips (we use Ghirardelli Barista chips because they don't sink to the bottom! Well done, Mr. Ghirardelli!) They were cheaper when I bought them last year, so watch for them on Amazon. I got them for under $5/lb. That's a big difference, and they're amazing. We've had our bag for about 10 months, and I store them wrapped at room temperature. Of course that room was a little cold this winter... :)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees (my degree symbol isn't working tonight!) Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs and bananas. Mix well. Add dry ingredients. Add vanilla. Add chocolate chips, if desired. Or add 3/4 cup chopped walnuts. Or add both!

Mix well and pour into greased and floured large loaf pan. Bake at 350 for about 45-60 minutes, depending on size of pan and your oven. Bread is done when toothpick inserted in center comes out dry with just a few moist crumbs hanging on.

Slice and serve warm or cool. To keep fresh, wrap in plastic wrap.

Cuteness ALERT!!!!! Mary Ruth and Joslyn, bakers extraordinaire!

Chocolate chips. YES!!!!

Xavier wants you to know that he put the chocolate chips in, and then Mary mixed them. Accurate reporting is what we do best!

Must get the pan ready!

One loaf pan and 3 big cupcake/muffins. Waiting is always the hard part! (Yes, that's a new stove. We had an appliance meltdown in the kitchen, the dishwasher and the old stove... Meet Shiny, the new stove. Double oven, Unlimited Potential! Shiny thinks he rules the kitchen, but he's wrong. As much as we love him, Ms. Dish ranks high on my preference list, because after 4 days of washing all the dishes by hand again I realized that I can write books because I now have a dishwasher. It all started with that first dishwasher, twelve years ago! Who knew???

The three amigos. (aka muffins)

And here Beth has arranged the beautiful loaf on one of our new plates. Please know that we can't take the new plates out of their boxes because the cupboards are DIRTY... and I won't put the new plates in there until I have time to scrub them. It would be wrong to do otherwise...

But we unpacked one plate to give us incentive! Not enough incentive, clearly, because the other 11 plates are still boxed up! But one of these days... :)

So that's what we've been up to this week, a little banana recycling! And yes, this is my favorite banana cake recipe so far!

(This is Zee Zee, showing you that he's got the big job of adding the chocolate chips! Stinking cute kid alert!) He's so proud of being a big boy now!