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Website: Smitten Kitchen
Tags: cake banana fruit cakes and pies banana bread
Recipe Reviews
I also love this recipe. It's convenient since it uses no dairy products (helpful if you've run out of them). I use olive oil for the butter and switch the add-ins depending on what I have, and I also use the lower amount of sugar. It freezes well.
(edited 17th July 2017) (0) comment (0) useful
Love this simple recipe. I used 4 smallish bananas, generous 3/4 cup brown sugar, and the optional bourbon. The loaf was moist with great banana flavor.
(edited 5th July 2017) (0) comment (0) useful
wester from Soesterberg, Utr
Easy to make, it smelled wonderful, and the children told me it tasted great too.
My cake needed almost exactly one hour baking time. The interval between the inside still being quite liquid and the cake being done was quite short, so be careful not to overbake.
friederike from Berlin,
I'm not really sure what exactly it is that we did wrong. We used four (not really smallish) bananas, and the batter turned out quite liquid. We had to bake it a full 1 1/2 hours, and well, it's not really what I hoped it would be. What did we do wrong? Too many bananas?
(DB suggests not using any butter at all, but somehow I don't buy that...)
Edited 14 August 2013:
I finally dared to make this recipe again - I mean, two 5 star ratings can't be that wrong? This time I used only 3 rather smallish bananas, and lo and behold, the cake turned out perfectly! DH had been very happy with last week's Banana Nut Bread, but found this recipe even more convincing. It's very dense (which I like), very moist and has a distinct banana flavour.
I had a look at the proportions. Assuming that a mashed banana is about 80 ml, the Banana Nut Bread contains about 20% banana in relation to the rest of the cake (excluding nuts); with three bananas, this Smitten Kitchen recipe comes in at about 25% banana and if you use four bananas, you'll even get 30% banana in your cake. That's roughly a 1 in 5, 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 ratio, respectively. No wonder I failed miserably the first time around, there was just too little cake to make it work.
Edited 17 June 2017:
We used 3 small bananas and half a large one and ended up with 270 g banana (peeled). The banana bread ended up being light and fluffy; you could probably use more banana than that. I thought the spices were a bit too strong.
(edited 18th June 2017) (0) comment (2) useful
Barbara from Amsterdam,
For years, my favourite Banana Bread recipe came from Joy of Cooking, but since Deb produced this one, it has become my standard. Not only are the spices wonderful, it easier to make, and uses fewer dishes (1 bowl!) than most other banana breads.
I never have bourbon on hand, so I skip that, and I top it with a pattern of pecan nuts.
Queezle_Sister from Salt Lake City, UT
Intense banana goodness! This recipe calls for 1/3C butter and 1 egg - when most banana bread recipes seem to call for 1/2 C butter and 2 eggs. But you won't miss that extra fat. My loaf turned out very moist (I used 4 bananas, the recipe calls for 3 or 4) and with amazing flavor. I liked the addition of nutmeg and cloves, in addition to the cinnamon, it gave a great flavor and cinnamon was NOT the predominant note. Finally, you jack this recipe up with 1T bourbon, I used wild turkey.
Suggested baking time is 50 minutes. Mine baked for 60, and its slightly underdone.
By the way, I usually want walnuts in my banana bread, but this is so good, I didn't even miss them.
(edited 16th April 2011) (0) comment (3) useful
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