I know, I know. I really don’t need to write about banana bread any more. This is the fourth post on banana related breads and cakes. You can find the others here, here and here. I think we can all agree that I am totally incapable of eating bananas before they are over ripe. We all have our flaws, I guess. My solution is of course, to freeze the bananas until I need to make banana bread. The problem with that solution is my freezer is tiny and last night I went on a fridge cleaning, freezer raid (to eliminate all the things that were starting to look like they had freezer burn) and decided it was time to use up all the bananas that were languishing there, threatening a coup. Obviously, if I was a smoothie drinking person, I could have just blended the bananas into smoothies. But I’m not. So more banana bread was the only solution (and convenient on-the-go breakfast food). I also had to get up at 7am to facilitate a fire drill and banana bread become a very necessary recovery activity afterwards.

You’ll be pleased to know that this is, in fact, different from the other banana recipes on this site. Apparently there are endless variations on banana bread/cake. This one is not sweet at all. In fact, you can eat it successfully with butter and honey. It’s dense with banana and heavy with oats and spelt. But it’s also addictive and more-ish and I suspect it will keep you going for days. It’s adapted from Scandilicious Baking, which is fast turning into my new, go-to book. I used a combination of plain and spelt flours, as I didn’t have any refined spelt flour. I also left out the pecans/walnuts, again because I didn’t have any but I don’t think my bread is lacking in any way. I decided to brown the butter, since it has to be melted anyway, and I am just loving brown butter at the moment. I used slightly more banana than originally called for, mainly because I wanted to be rid of the frozen bananas. Finally I reversed the method, adding the wet ingredients to the dry ones. The resulting bread feels a bit like health bread (I think it’s the oats that does it) but in a good way.

Banana Bread

Adapted from Scandilicious Baking

4 medium bananas

1/3 cup + 2 tbsp buttermilk

75g butter

1/3 cup maple syrup

1 egg

225g plain flour

50g wholemeal spelt flour

60g rolled oats

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp bicarb

freshly ground nutmeg (about 1/4 tsp)

a pinch of sea salt

Preheat the oven to 170C and line a loaf tin with baking paper and butter.

Melt the butter and cook it until it starts to brown and smells nutty. Remove from the heat and cool.

Mash the bananas and then stir in the buttermilk, maple syrup, egg and cooled butter.

Mix the rest of the ingredients together in a separate bowl.

Make a well in the dry ingredients and then pour in the wet ingredients. Mix everything together with a wooden spoon, taking care to ensure everything is incorporated (you don’t want little pockets of flour randomly about). Spoon the mixture into the loaf tin, smooth down with a spatula and sprinkle with a tablespoon of oats.

Bake for about 50 minutes, until the cake is risen and golden and a skewer inserted comes out clean. Allow to cool in the tin before turning out and eating with butter and honey…