Easy Banana Bread

I have posted a couple of recipes for banana bread before – here and here – but it’s one of those things that you never stop messing with, trying to find the one that will become a ‘everyday recipe’: a fall-back, a happy in the knowledge that there is some either in the kitchen or smuggled safely away in the freezer for times of emergency recipe.

As banana bread never stays around for long it seems to be on a constant rotation of either being made or being eaten. What is it about banana bread that makes it so hard to resist? It’s almost as if it calls your name from the counter.

And let’s face it, grey gloomy mornings are made infinitely better with the knowledge that a slice of banana bread is on offer to accompany a restoring cup of tea.

Therefore a simple and easy recipe is required.

While I am sure that many of you may have your own favourite recipe, I am pretty certain that this will become mine. It came about because an excess of bananas unexpectedly happened. I thought there was only one left so more were bought only to get home and discover that there were actually four occupying the space in the kitchen and although there was nowhere near enough green on the skin for me to eat them, there wasn’t quite enough black to make them perfect banana bread fodder, which is why you can see such obvious chunks of banana in this bread. They were still a little firm. Nevermind. As the prospect of banana bread had already been thought of it would have been impossible to wait until they were all black and sickly sweet.

I used a mixture of buckwheat flour and brown teff flour in this bread because I am currently having a love affair with brown teff flour. I love the flavour it gives and also – and this may sound bizarre – the fact that it is brown. It makes things seem more wholesome.

Brown teff flour is available in good health food shops and also on-line (I got my first bag from Amazon) but if you can’t get hold of it then brown rice flour would be a good substitution.

I also used date syrup (because I have been hearing lots of good things about it) along side coconut sugar, but you can use all sugar if you wish. I just wanted to use unrefined sweeteners and the flavour of the dates is well and truly overshadowed by the banana. If that is something that is likely to bother you.

What is a miracle is that I actually managed to get photos of this bread. Not because it was in danger of being inhaled so quickly but because I was being heckled by my mother. I was due to take the dog for a walk with my dad but wanted to take these photos before too much of the daylight faded. She poked her head in the dining room to see how long I was going to be, and promptly told me that I was holding the camera wrong.

Now, people, I was not holding the camera wrong. Not for me.

Although I am right-handed, I am left eye dominant, which means that I look through anything with a view finder with my left eye – microscopes, cameras etc. – when in theory I should look through it with my right. The one time I went clay pigeon shooting I had to have my left eye blocked out with a bit of cardboard ripped off the cartridge box (a really stylish look, in case you were wondering) because if it hadn’t been blocked out I would have constantly missed those little clay suckers as I would have been pulling to the left the whole time.

Being left eye dominant is not that uncommon, but in all of my time on this planet so far my mum has not noticed this. And she found it hilarious.

Earlier in the day I had mentioned that I seem to have a bit of natural sway – I am incapable of being completely still – so sometimes the photos I take can be a little squiffy, but with the wonders of Photoshop this can be corrected. But according to my mum, maybe if I “held the camera properly” this wouldn’t happen.

Ladies and gentle-beans, in order to ease the taunting I tried using my right eye. It was a disaster. I couldn’t see anything. Either I kept offering the view finder up to the bridge of my nose (!!!) or I kept closing my right eye. Looking through a view finder with a closed eye does not help you take a photo.

Eventually I told her to leave me alone. I was holding the camera the right way, for me, and that is all that matters.

Are any of you right-handed yet left eye dominant? Let me know. I’m positive I can’t be alone in this!