Hello everyone! Welcome to BirthMay 2020! Today, I’m sharing my first experience baking banana bread!

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So for this baking adventure I followed the Bon Appetit’s Best Banana Bread recipe. I also watched the video on BA’s YouTube channel featuring this recipe, which was insanely helpful!

I’m trying a slightly new format for “reviewing” baking recipes I find. I’m going to put the pro’s and con’s, basically what I found easy or more stressful, while baking according to this recipe. Then results will, of course, talk about the outcome of the bake. And lastly, thoughts on the baking experience as a whole. I hope that format works well!

In case you’re new, BirthMay is my annual birthday celebration where I blog every day for the month of May. This is the fourth annual BirthMay and no matter how many BirthMays you’ve been here for, thank you for your support!

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My BA’s Best Banana Bread Quarantine Baking Experience

Recipe Pros

I really liked how easy it was to get the ingredients. I already had a ton of the items, and only needed to pick up a couple things. Pretty much just the sour cream and bananas! I didn’t do the optional items because my mom was the one that requested this item and didn’t want me to add the extras. I did like how detailed the BA recipes are, complete with images and short videos on their webpage for this recipe. Plus, the video was really, really helpful too. I really got a sense of how to best prep for this bake, what to expect, and didn’t have any moments of panic!

Recipe Cons

I really didn’t have a problem with this recipe! It was super easy to follow along and I didn’t have an issue following along. I think really the biggest issue was that you have to mix this for four, yes FOUR, minutes as I don’t have a stand mixer so my arms got so tired holding the hand mixer!

Oh! And I actually forgot about one of the ingredients I did have to buy, the dark brown sugar. I had some difficulty finding this item. I went to Aldi’s and Walmart in my town with no luck before heading to a nearby town’s Mariano’s where I finally found it. It was a little annoying because I was trying to limit the places I went to given the current situation but it was to the point that I already had the bananas and everything else so I felt like I had to get it. The video (which I watched after I finally found dark brown sugar) said I could have substituted light brown sugar which I did have, but the recipe didn’t say that at all! Also, I had Googled and it said I could combine light brown sugar and molasses to make dark brown sugar, but I’d unfortunately thrown out the molasses from when I did gingerbread cookies so I didn’t have that option. Ah well, I found it in the end!

One more thing, it’s not in the written recipe but the video has Carla, one of the BA staff, putting granulated sugar on the top of the loaf before baking to add a bit of a topping onto the bread. That’s something she said she just does for preference so I tried it and I really liked it! I’d say you should absolutely coat a thin layer on the top with sugar.

Results

The end result was… okay! I don’t think I waited long enough for the bananas to ripen, they likely needed a few more days. However, I wanted to make sure it was done before Mother’s Day as my mom had requested it. There were a few days left to go, but I wanted to just get to baking! Hopefully next time I can find more ripe bananas at the store, but pickings were slim when I went. I think the bread was a bit bland because of this, as did my mom, but my dad loved it since he doesn’t like things that are too sweet. It wasn’t bad, but just not as good as I thought and I think it was because of the bananas! I also don’t think I mashed them as well as I should have so it was a bit chunky, which I didn’t love.

Thoughts

I’m very glad that I mashed the bananas and measured the ingredients before I started! I used to measure as I went, and I would find it stressful trying to measure during the process but I didn’t want to use multiple jars or plates or anything to pre-measure. However, that’s really helpful and I much prefer washing half the kitchen utensils (okay that’s dramatic but you get the picture) than trying to quickly measure everything as I’m trying to quickly combine stuff. The only thing that I realized too late was that the eggs need to be added one at a time and I’d already cracked them both into one bowl, so I had to kind of dump about half the combined eggs first and then the rest. It worked, but I will for sure read ahead for that stuff next time!

That is one thing I need to get better at, reading the entire recipe before doing anything! I would have caught that egg thing and in previous recipes I’ve tried it would have come in handy too. I did read some of the comments afterwards and saw how other people substituted ingredients or added to the recipe. Someone said they added ground cinnamon which I wish I’d seen before since that sounds great! It was really cool to see how they changed stuff up.

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That’s pretty much it for the banana bread! Let me know if you’ve made this recipe or what’s different in your favorite banana bread recipe from this one.

Thanks for reading!

Pamela

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