Wondering About Banana Bread...

I'm going to make a new list. It's going to be titled: Seven Wonders of The Baking World and wonder number one is going to be, café style banana bread - I really WONDER how they make it!!?

It's not like I haven't been doing anything lately, but this has been one of life's mysteries for me for quite some time now. Why is café style banana bread six hundred times better than the kind you make at home? Annoying. And why does every single café seem to use the same recipe?!#! Even more annoying. What is in it? Where are they getting it from? How do they get it so sticky, dense and moist? Do you think that I've actually asked anyone...? That's a rhetorical question by the way and the answer is no - it's far better just to sit here and speculate on Blogger.

I have tried a few different recipes over the recent past that professed to be banana bread but I remained somewhat unmoved and dissatisfied by the results - they certainly did not produce the banana bread that I knew. So I did the trusty 'café style banana bread' search and found myself here. I was excited. Then last Friday I gathered my nuts and bananas, which I'd been storing in the freezer (a great way to keep your over-ripe bananas by the way)...

I left them to brown for a while (apparently a trick of the café).

I mixed all the dry ingredients and all the wet in separate bowls...

Then mixed them together and baked for a little over the specified time and ended up with this:

Yes, it is very loaf like and was quite tasty but sadly it just was not like at the café!

Yesterday, while perusing through a small pile of recipe books I came across Apple & Banana Bread so I thought I'd give it a whirl, having done a quick scan of the ingredients and realising I had everything, we got started.

Apples, bananas and cinnamon basking in the morning sunlight...

As my son mixed away, creaming the butter and sugar and then adding the eggs slowly I couldn't really see much difference between a cake recipe and this one and I could feel wonder number two coming on.... what is the difference apart from the obvious shape of the pan. This wondering was followed by more not-so-trusty google searching, yielding many differences of opinion and thus I have been left, still wondering.

On a brighter note, the bread cake turned out nicely - it's lovely and sweet with the apple.

Linking up with Jodie The Haby Goddess