I Found A Keeper!

Yep, that's right, after four months of recipe pondering, I found a fantastic recipe... Banana Bread!

There were a couple of problems with it, but they were actually caused by me. So I am hoping that if anybody else tries the recipe they follow my advice so they don't make the same mistakes.

Now, before we get to the recipe, let's talk a little bit about banana bread. I have and believe I always will, HATE bananas. The texture makes my face cringe and the sweetness has always annoyed me. When people eat it, I have to leave the room because the sound is so disgusting.

Knowing that, I will continue to mention that I have only had banana bread once before in my life, and that was when I was a little kid. Recently I became interested in baking breads but my luck with yeast and kneading has always been pretty slim. Plus baking bread is such a huge time commitment that I never really felt like I could accomplish the task to perfection. And believe or not Mom, I do aim for perfection.

My brother came home last month with a gift for my mom of banana and zucchini breads. That sparked my bakers heart and I was determined to make it sometime. Yesterday was that time. I looked up vegan banana bread and was slightly surprised to find all of these recipes that sounded really good. Finally I settled on the one that had so many good reviews I wished that the bread was already baked.

I found this recipe on about.com, and I agree with every good review.

Makes 1 9"x5" loaf

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Cook Time: 1 hour

Total Time: 1 hour, 10 minutes

Ingredients:

• 2 cups all- purpose flour
• 3/4 cups white granulated sugar (I prefer unrefined cane sugar) (- that's not me but this is! I actually ran out of sugar so I used as much of a 1/2 cup as I had available and then toped it off with light brown sugar.)
• 1/2 cup dark brown sugar, packed (I used light brown)
• 3/4 t. baking soda
• 3/4 t. salt
• 3/4 t. cinnamon
• 1/2 cup plain soy milk or almond milk (I used soy)
• 1 t. apple cider vinegar
• 2 cups mashed banana, from about 4 large very ripe bananas
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 2 T. maple syrup
• 1 t. vanilla extract
• Walnuts (optional) (I didn't add them)

Preparation:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 F. Lightly oil a p"x5" loaf pan and set aside.

2. In a medium-sized mixing bowl, sift together the flour, sugars, baking soda, salt and cinnamon.

3. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the soy milk and cider vinegar and let stand for 2 minutes. Add the mashed banana canola oil, maple syrup, and vanilla extract, whisking until well combined. Add the dry ingredients to the wet mixing until just prepared loaf pan. Bake for about 1 hour, or until a toothpick inserted in to the center emerges clean. Allow the bread to cool on a wire cooling rack for 20 minutes before serving. Serve warm or at room temperature.

~

I am going to tell you my mistake, so listen carefully. This did not effect the taste at all, so I can tell everybody confidently that it tastes unreal, but it did effect the bake time and the density and bake time. I didn't mash my bananas well enough. I don't know if you can blend them, or if it would mess with the recipe, but make sure that they are REALLY WELL MASHED.

What happened to me was that I thought that they were mashed enough, but there were still chunks in it. So when I baked it a large amount of the chunky banana fell to the bottom and made it so I had to bake it for about an hour longer. It still didn't become fluffy like the top of the bread, but it still tastes good. And in my opinion that's what really matters.

BUT, next time I would definitely make sure that they were mashed like baby food!

Other than that the bread is a great consistency with just the right amount of sweet, it's a really nice batter, and the loaf itself has a great density and it's really moist. If you start to see the edges browning way to much you can foil the edges like you would do a pie. That's what I did after a while.

Enjoy!