January 15, 2019

Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

Baking with M Week 1 2019

A very belated Happy New Year! Despite being on school break for two weeks for the holidays, we did very little baking after Cookiepalooza 2018. We spent Christmas together, caught up on errands and doctor’s appointments, worked a little, celebrated the New Year, took a road trip to Dallas, and got ready to get back to the regular routine.

Well, I’m here to tell you that routine got the best of us, and by the time I actually finished this post, it was April. We baked these back on January 12, and I’m just now getting around to sharing the details.

Between then and now, work has been busy for both Matt and I, and although he hasn’t been on the road much lately for work, we’ve been on the go. We’ve had some doctor appointments between all four of us, a trip to chilly Syracuse, NY, a work conference, celebrating M’s 6th (6th!) birthday, and a visit from Grandma and one of the cousins.

Whew.

More on some of those later! (plus: BIG changes on the immediate horizon!)

Back to the Baking

In the meantime, let’s finish this post. You might suspect we do a lot of baking with bananas. I’ll confess, we never make it through a whole bunch of bananas before they turn. There’s nothing better to do with an overripe banana (imho) than stick it in some batter and bake it.

For her part, M hates eating real bananas. (younger sister S has been digging them lately). However, she LOVES mashing them with the “mashy thingy”, aka a potato masher. She’s really getting good at it, and mixing too. She was really inspired by watching the Kids’ Baking Championship on Food Network, while we have SlingTV for football season (we don’t have “cable” the rest of the year).

For the recipe, we used the same one as we made for Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins, but we made a couple of substitutions.

1. Vegan Buttermilk

I’ve found that despite my moderate milk allergy, eating small amounts of dairy doesn’t bother me. However, I still try to avoid it. I use almond milk in my coffee and in pancakes, and I recently had a pretty tasty almond milk ice cream (though it’s not as creamy as the real thing).

The recipe calls for a stick of butter and a half cup of buttermilk. This time I still used butter, but swapped out the buttermilk with a vegan “buttermilk” made with almond milk. You can find that recipe over here.

2. Baking Pans

This time to make breads we used two 9×5″ baking pans. You could probably get away with putting it all into a single pan, but it would take much longer to bake. I weighed the pans on a food scale before baking to make sure they would bake evenly.