Emergency Post: Banana Bread

I cannot tell you how over-excited I am about this banana bread. It's the recipe my mum used when I was small and BOY did I love her banana bread. And her banana ice cream, come to think of it. Must get that recipe off her. And also a freezer. Anyhoo, I have been thinking about banana bread a great deal of late, perhaps because I came back from London armed with some new baking tools (new as in novel, they were handed down to me by my lovely Grannie) including an unused loaf tin; it may also be because we have a large bunch of brown speckly bananas heavily perfuming the flat.

It turns out my loaf tin is a bit large, so my loaf was
a bit shallow.  Ah well, just get to make twice as
much next time!

Whatever: all of a sudden, yesterday became Banana Bread Monday. Honestly, I was having a mug of tea at three o'clock, thought "I'd really like some banana bread with my second cup" and was eating a lovely warm, crumbly slice of the stuff just after four (and with my wheat intolerance, was looking like an elephant in her third term of pregnancy by half five. Totally worth it, I might add). I was slightly unsure about the whole thing because (a) I have absolutely no faith in my baking skills WHATSOVER (and I have outlined my concerns about baking previously) and (b) when I finally got some internet access last night I discovered that my friend K had also been busily baking banana bread on the other side of town and she's basically a total baking pro, so I felt rather like there probably wasn't any point in doing it at all. (K oversaw me hammering together a Nigel Slater chocolate cake for my father-in-law's birthday a few weeks ago: it actually turned out extremely well in the end but with my haphazard preparation skills I'd be surprised if she has any faith in my baking either. She's a dab hand with an eight-inch knife and 500g hazelnuts, incidentally.) I also nearly had brain fail when I realised that my mum had sent me through the recipe in ounces so I was going to have to do some pretty hardcore mathematics (numbers are not a strong point; thank you, internet, for your plethora of conversion websites). To make things even worse, the recipe involved self-raising flour, a foodstuff which just does not exist here in Germany: I had to do further maths to work out how many teaspoons of baking powder I needed to add to my normal flour to have the same sort of effect. Completely exhausting, and of course I have no idea how any of these things work so aside from the cake turning out alright it's beyond a miracle the kitchen didn't just blow up. When it came down to it, I simply decided that rather than worry about things too much, I'd just shove everything together willy-nilly and rely on some good old-fashioned blind faith. And do you know what? It only bloody worked.

Ingredients

[I'm afraid I didn't make a note of the weight conversions I came up with, although to be honest, apart from the rather unreliable mathematical calculations I did, my extremely silly scales only have VERY LARGE AMOUNTS on them so any notes I took wouldn't be accurate in any case. The good news is it appears my presumption that all amounts needs to be exact for a cake to turn out as it should wasn't correct: oh, how I shall surely be embracing that discovery.]

Anyway, yes, ingredients...

1 large ripe banana, very well mashed

1 egg, beaten

2oz castor sugar

3oz butter

4 oz self-raising flour (or for those residing in Germany: normal flour type 405 plus a teaspoon and a bit of baking powder)

Method

Cream the butter and sugar together (I used my hands: it was fun), add the very well mashed banana and stir, then slowly mix in the egg. Next, gently fold in the flour. Mine looked very much like a really horrible undercooked scrambled egg at this point. If it's really very curdled (because your egg was massive), then apparently you can just add a little more flour to sort that out. Smooth the mixture into a small lined, buttered loaf tin and bake for 25 minutes at 350˚F (which I can tell you is 180˚). Funnily enough, even though my oven is fan-assisted it actually took more like 35 minutes, but you can tell when your banana bread is ready when you can push a knife into the middle and it comes out clean.

I literally cannot believe how easy it was, and it was just as good as my mum used to make it (if I may be so bold). Seriously, if I can do it, anyone can. Do it. Now.