Wholewheat Banana Bread (made with Honey)

Bake-a-thon 2015: Day 5

Bake of the Day: Wholewheat Banana Bread

I sometimes feel that overripe bananas are a bane of my existence. They haunt me with their lingering smell and I can't eat or throw them away. The family abandons them the minute they turn slightly blotchy outside even though they are perfect inside. I have learnt to show them only peeled ones so they don't judge it by the package.

Even with all this I end up with 3~4 overripe bananas by the end of the week. I have so many versions of banana breads/ muffins that making another one doesn't excite me that much. But this recipe from Cookie+Kate is made with wholewheat (pastry) flour and is sweetened with honey (or maple syrup) got me off my behind and into the kitchen to bake.

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Wholewheat Zucchini Bread for #BreadBakers

It's time for #Breadbakers again and I'm so excited to host it this month. The theme I picked is 'Breads using Summer Bounty'. So any bread, quick or with yeast, using fruits, herbs and vegetables from your garden or fresh from the farmer's market can be made. We have a delicious list of breads from the lovely bakers, don't forget to visit their blogs (listed at the end of the post).

I planted a zucchini plant in my raised vegetable bed this year. It started flowering beginning of July and I was hoping for a bumper crop of zucchini. Little did I know that not all flowers become fruit. With no zucchini in sight even after 3~4 weeks, I started to panic. A quick google search even led me to think that there were no bees in our area to pollinate the flowers and I might end up zucchini-less after all. Then one day I saw these 2 big ones -- not sure how I missed them the whole time. Then the next day I found a gigantic 13" one -- I might have to get my glasses checked now. I'm glad that my zucchini story ended on a positive note. Not sure if I'll get more though -- I see flowers but no tiny or big zucchinis :-(

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Carrot-Zucchini Bread

It has been a while I participated in Home Baker's Challenge and even this month I would have missed the posting deadline if I hadn't checked the FB updates. I remember seeing this month's bakes announcement last month and then completely forgot about it during thew holiday season. Thankfully I remembered about the challenge right on time and made this moist and delicious Carrot-Zucchini bread yesterday.

My son does not like carrots and avoids them like plague. Interestingly, I was looking through my blog posts from few years back and I wrote in one of the posts that my son loved carrots and added them in just about everything. It's all reversed now and he doesn't want to get even close to carrots. So the easiest thing to do is disguise it in some way, so he'll eat it.

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Vegan Mango Bread

Blogging Marathon# 47: Week 4/ Day 1
Theme: Bookmarked Recipes
Dish: Vegan Mango Bread

We are starting our last and final week of blogging marathon for this year today. My theme for this week is 'Bookmarked Recipes'. I have so many recipes in my bookmarks that it is even impossible to make them all in this life time. Also I don't think I will ever be able to organize them in a proper way to actually see what I have in there. All these recipes are bookmarked all over the place -- some on Pinterest, some on Foodgawker, some on my desktop and some on my laptop.

I looked through all my photo folders from this year and found 3 bookmarked recipes that I already made but didn't get a chance to post. So this is my idea of cleaning up my folders for the new year.

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Chocolate Hazelnut Quick Bread (Nutella Chocolate Quick Bread)

Bake-a-thon 2014: Day 2
Bake of the Day: Chocolate Hazelnut Quick Bread
Smart phones are so convenient to take photos of just about anything we see anytime, anywhere. I browse through food magazines at the check out lanes and click photos of interesting recipes on my phone. Doctor's office is another place where I usually end up taking lot of recipe photos on the phone.

Today's quick bread recipe was one of those I clicked from Food Network magazine in a grocery store. I think there were abut 50 quick bread recipes, both sweet and savory, and they looked very interesting -- so I made sure I saved them.

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Applesauce Oatmeal Bread

King Arthur Flour is my go-to site to buy quality baking ingredients and fool-proof baking recipes. I splurge about 2~3 times a year and buy specialty ingredients for baking and cooking. My absolute favorite is their Vermont cheese powder that I use at least once a week to make mac & cheese for my kids. Another one of my favorite pantry ingredient from KAF is their pizza seasoning blend. It gives the homemade pizza that extra oomph and flavor.

I get KAF catalog every month and that is one magazine that I almost read from cover-to-cover, but all it has is their products and recipes. I make note of all the new additions to the product line-up, just so that I don't miss out on them :-)

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Banana Chocolate Swirl Bread

Bananas are probably the most consumed fruit in my household. Even my picky 5 year old eats banana without too much complaining. All the other fruits have to be converted into juices & smoothies for him. But the problem with bananas, that too buying in bulk, is the whole bunch ripens at the same time and all of them go from bright yellow to speckled and then over-ripe in matter of 2 days, especially in the hot weather. Which is why I'm always looking for recipes to use my excess bananas and I have posted quite a few different recipes from smoothies to breads to brownies with bananas.

 

When I saw Chef Mireille's announcement for 'Taste of the Tropics - Banana', I knew this is the time to publish my banana recipes that have been in my drafts for quite some time now.

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Banana-Chocolate Bread

Today's bread is my son’s absolute favorite. He loves chocolate in about anything; pancakes, cookies, pies, roti anything at all. If you ask him if he likes to eat something, his question would be does it have chocolate in it? So when I saw this Banana-Chocolate bread recipe in Everyday Food magazine, I just had to make it. 

This is a quick bread which almost has a cake-like moist texture. Since I have both bread & cake in the same sentence, I started to think what the difference between bread and cake is – you have banana bread and then you have banana cake. I wasn’t sure and then when I googled it, I found that David Lebovitz also has the same question. At that point, I stopped looking for an answer and went to enjoy my banana bread.

I used half whole wheat pastry flour and half AP flour to make it a little healthy.

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Banana-Walnut Bread

All the ingredients for this recipe can be combined in a food processor which makes it a perfect entry to Mansi’s BBD# 18: Quick Bread event. Bread Baking Day (BBD) is the brainchild of Zorra @ Kochtopf.

This recipe is from Vegetarian Bible by Sarah Brown. The recipe used pecans and dried apricots, I subbed them with walnuts & raisins resp.

Recipe adapted from Vegetarian Bible

Ingredients:

Self Rising Flour – 2 cups (I used 2 cups AP flour + 3 tsp Baking powder + 1 tsp salt)

Butter – ½cup, melted

Eggs – 3

Light brown sugar – ½ cup

Bananas – 3 ripe, chopped

Walnuts – 1 cup

Raisins – ½ cup

Method:

• Reserve ½ cup walnuts for garnish.
  
• Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease an 8” circular baking pan or 9”x 5” loaf pan.
• Add bananas, flour, eggs, butter, sugar, nuts & raisins to the food processor; pulse till well combined. (I had some technical problems with my processor when I tried to turn it on after dumping all the ingredients in it; so I had to dump everything back into a bowl and use a hand mixer to mix. It was a little annoying cleaning up the mess, but the bread turned out just fine).
• Pour into the prepared pan; arrange the reserved walnuts on the top. Bake for 45-50 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
  
• Cool in pan.

This bread tastes great toasted with some butter. I brought it to my colleague’s birthday breakfast and everybody loved it.