Julie's Boggle

For a while now I have been trying to perfect my banana bread baking. According to the expert cook I consulted (my Mom), this is not the easiest because of the variability you get in one of the main ingredients – the bananas.

(The variation in banana size and stage of ripeness can make a big difference to the batter and therefore the exact cooking time required.)

Anyhoo, this time I thought I would get it spot on. I had 5 perfectly average bananas in a slightly advanced stage of ripeness (i.e. too spotty for me to want to eat them.) And this time I made sure I used caster sugar instead of regular sugar because it turns out our regular sugar doesn’t “cream” well with the butter and this lends a certain brick-like consistency to the finished product.

I followed the recipe diligently, knocking it out during an episode of Baby Einstein. Then got back to feeding Jon and waiting for my perfect loaf to bake.

I’d noticed some wateriness about the bananas when I was mashing them, so I wasn’t too surprised when the loaf hadn’t finished baking after the hour the recipe advised. I turned the oven down a little because it had attained a very pleasing brown colour already, and reset the timer.

Even after another half-hour of cooking, I still wasn’t overly suspicious about the preponderance of moisture inside the loaf, but when we got to the end of the second hour, enough was enough and I pulled it out.

I was musing over this strange sticky phenomenon while hanging up the laundry and waiting for the dubious loaf to cool. Tom meanwhile was reading out loud through the recipe which I’d left on the surface.

It was when he got to the line “Half a cup of milk and water”, that the hammer blow struck. No!! I’d put in a whole cup(!), roughly chucking in about half a cup of water followed by milk to bring it up to 250ml.

Good grief, half a cup of liquid extra, no wonder it wasn’t setting.

On the plus side, we dug into it (with spoons) while it was still warm and Tom decreed it to be the best banana flop ever. Warm, crunchy, chewy banana bread outside; soft, gooey banana-bread flavoured interior. Quite yummy and I think it would go well with custard.

I suppose as flops go, it could have been a lot worse.