Baking Banana Bread

I love bananas.  One of the real treats living in Nigeria was the abundance of the fruit – we could just walk into the garden and pick them straight from the ‘trees’, although you had to keep a careful eye out for snakes.  The bananas in Nigeria were nothing like the big tasteless ones you tend to get in Europe, they were small, soft and oh so sweet.  We were even able to get red bananas which were sweeter still, and plantain which is not at all nice raw but is beautiful fried. 

One of the things that surprised me when we moved to Kazakhstan was the easy availability of bananas, we get them year round and although they are a little pricey the cost is not prohibitive.  I am not sure where they come from but they are reasonably tasty.  They do perish rather quickly so you can have to

eat them fast or leave a few to go black and then bake banana bread. The break is very easy to make - so much so that I tend to use it as my stand by for unexpected visitors and the children have learned that if they leave some bananas in the bowl they will get cake.  It is also a cake with ingredients that are easily sourced just about everywhere, even in the most obscure postings.

My banana bread is based on a heavily edited version of Nigella Lawson’s recipe from How to Be a Domestic Goddess. I leave out the nuts (I worry about young children eating nuts) and add chocolate chips.   I take 110g of raisins and soak them in Tokaji overnight, if I don’t have time or, more likely, forget to do this the day before I just boil them up on the hob.  Most recipes call for rum, brandy or bourbon but the mellow taste of Tokaji works extremely well with the banana bread.  It is, in fact, my sweet cooking wine of choice but it can be difficult to find.  In a pinch I will use Madeira or Sherry.  

Raisins in Tokaij

In one bowl I combine approximately 175g of flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder and ½ of baking soda. 

In another bowl I mix 125g of melted butter and 150g of sugar.  Add 4 mashed, over-ripe bananas to the butter mix followed by two eggs, the raisins (and any left-over Tokaji, don’t waste it) and vanilla extract.  I then add the dry ingredients to the wet; I find if I add a little at a time I only need to use a wooden spoon to mix. Once that is done I add the chocolate chunks about 75g, I like really dark, bitter chocolate because I think it combines well with the bananas, if I can't find proper cooking chocolate I just use my own. 

Ready for the Oven

The cake goes in a low oven (about 170 degrees) until a tester (a knife in my case) comes out clean, this is usually about 1 hour but it might take a little longer.  I know that I should not eat the cake mix but who can resist it? The mashed bananas make this particular mix deliciously satisfying.

Banana Bread

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Sugar Sugar: How to bake without specialty sugars

I had a wonderful afternoon yesterday as a friend invited  seven or eight of us over for tea and cakes.  She had made a wonderfully tasty chocolate fudge cake (my favorite) and a bannoffee and lemon meringue pie.  Yumm.  It is always good to meet up with friends because, to a great extent, they stand in for your family when you are abroad.

During our meet up talk turned, for a while, as it always does to what you can find in the shops and how to cope when you can't.  I mentioned that I had seen some caster sugar the other day and was immediately asked for details of where and when I had seen it.  Caster sugar is quite rare here and usually you have to bake with granular sugar.  I have written before on baking without baking powder and without baking chocolate but sugar is a fairly key ingredient to any cake.

Granulated sugar is easy to find

I have got used to using granular sugar, as it is not difficult to turn it into caster sugar - just put it through a coffee mill.  My food processor came with a special mini mill which I use for this purpose.  Just blitz it in 15 second bursts to make sure that you do not over process.  I usually just blitz enough to use on the cake I am baking at that particular time but I sometimes do a bulk load for friends who do not have a mill.

It is easy to make your own caster sugar

Icing sugar is easily available here and in most places.   I have made my own in the past, usually when I have realised that I had forgotten to buy the powdered sugar in the shops and had no time to go and get more.  Just blitz the sugar to a very fine powder (checking at 15 second intervals) and then add 1 tablespoon of cornstarch for every 250g of sugar.

Muscovado sugar is one of my favorite baking ingredients, it makes a lovely toffee sauce, works brilliantly in a lot of banana recipes and when combined with orange juice and mustard powder gives a tasty glaze to ham and is a must when cooking red cabbage.  Muscovado sugar is like gold dust here in Astana.  I found some in the supermarket last year and bought four kilos.  I am nearly out of it now.

All is not lost, however, because I can buy molasses here.  If you add about 2tbsp of Molasses to ordinary baking sugar to get a good replacement for muscovado sugar.  Alternatively you can replace Muscovado sugar with ordinary brown sugar.  There is less moisture in brown sugar so you may need to check your recipe and add a little more liquid.  In places where molasses has been impossible to find I have used honey or maple syrup in its place.  The recipe tastes different but not unpleasantly so. 

One of the problems of using muscovado sugar is that it gets hard very fast.  I am always careful to store mine in airtight containers but it still gets hard and my four kilos became rock solid very quickly.  I know that it is possible to re-hydrate it by placing some slices of apple or bread in the container with the sugar (remove once moist).  I usually forget to do this, if I remember that I need it the night before baking I will cover the sugar with a damp kitchen towel and leave it overnight.  If I forget that I soften it in the microwave, this takes care because the sugar can get too hot and melt or burn.  Place it in a container and put a glass of water beside it.  I usually zap it in 30 second intervals checking if it is soft in between.  In extremis (my microwave was broken) I have just used it as is without softening but using the grater to break up the larger pieces., I probably should have used the food processor.

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