Banana Nut Bread with Lemon Sugar Glaze Recipe

bettyskitchen

Hi I’m Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. Today we’re making banana bread and this is
a request from one of my viewers and you may have noticed lately that I have gotten a
little bit away from the quick and easy that I started out with. I’m still trying to do things
that are quick and easy for you to do so you’ll be successful and if you haven’t have a lot
of experience cooking. You will begin to enjoy it because you will have some good
recipes to work with but then again when somebody asked me to do a carrot cake or a
banana bread I will try to oblige you if possible.

So we’re doing banana bread. I like you to look at these bananas say they’re speckled a
little bit. This is about the stage they should be when you make your banana bread. You
do not want to get the freshest possible bananas from your grocery store and bring them
home and make the banana bread because those are just too hard and stiff we want them
for their much softer now not overripe because they change flavors. They lose a lot of
their sweetness and that will not make good banana bread. You can see what I have done
with the 3 bananas. I had 3 just like that and I didn’t even slice them I just started
mashing them. I peeled them obviously and then I started mashing with a fork and this
consistency is fine because we’re going to be beating all of this together in just a minute.

So you need a large mixing bowl and then we have an ingredient here which is peanut oil.
Use any kind of vegetable oil that you would like and you get this out of the way. We’re
using ½ cup that goes into my mixing bowl and then to that I’m going to add some sugar
and I just use fine old granulated sugar one cup. Now you’re going to mix this together
before you continue to make things a little simpler as we go on so you have a mixture
here of your peanut oil and your sugar and if you want to actually beat that a little bit you
can do so with a mixer. I just don’t want to bring in that noise right now so let’s get rid of
these.

Now we’re going to add 2 well beaten eggs. I put this up to remind me. I use jumbo eggs
but you could use 2 small eggs it wouldn’t make too much difference. It will be fine so 2
eggs I have already beaten and they’re sitting right here so we’ll bring our mixing bowl
over and get those in there and it’s time for our bananas to go in. So our 3 mashed
bananas into the mixing bowl. Now let’s take the spoon out and I’m actually going to use
my electric mixer to beat this until it is very well combined. So I’m going to go away for
a minute and come back with this nicely beaten for you.

So this is what our mixture looks like after I have beaten it for about 1-1/2 minutes I
guess somewhere between one and 2 minutes will be fine and you’ll get this kind of
consistency. You’ll see a little bit of lumps here which are the bananas but obviously we
had well beaten eggs going in so it’s not lumps of eggs or anything like that. Continuing
down the line here I have some skim milk, any kind of milk regular milk 2% if you like
you need to have 3 tablespoons. Now I put this in a ¼ cup measure but it’s not all the way
to the top so I don’t want to mislead you on that. I measured that 3 tablespoons of milk so
that’s what we need 3 tablespoons of milk and we’re through with that.

And then I’ll stir this around just slightly to prepare it for the flour that is coming up. I
have some self rising flour that means I don’t have to add any soda, salt, baking powder
which saves me a little trouble so I prefer to use that but we need 2 cups of flour and I
think I will go ahead and add my vanilla first. It doesn’t really matter but it’s easier to
mix it in liquid into liquid. I have ½ teaspoon of pure vanilla extract so that goes into my
mixing bowl and there we go a little easier to mix at that point. We have 2 cups of flour
now this I’m going to mix my hand and probably it will be better if I just do that a little at
a time and just make a nice batter of it. We’re really making bread here and we’re going
to be cooking it in a loaf pan.

The loaf pan is already prepared. I have sprayed with some canola spray so you just need
some type of cooking oil spray if you don’t want to use that then you could use some
butter or margarine and I would advise if you use butter or margarine that maybe dust a
little flour over the bottom and sides. I’m emptying the rest of this out and we’ll finish
stirring in the flour and there will be 1 more ingredient. And so this is making quite a lot
of dough but we’re going to have nice big loaf of banana bread and I think you’ll like it.
Almost done so let’s get that last ingredient and here it is, we have ½ cup this is called
fancy pecan pieces. I call it chopped pecans. You can use another kind of nut if you
prefer something different like almonds or English walnuts but pecans for me. I guess fro
the south that’s probably my first choice.

And when you get those blended in then your batter is ready to put into your loaf pan.
You can make this in a bundt cake pan or regular cake pans or square pans or oblong
pans but it is a loaf. It is bread, banana bread and so I like to put it in loaf pans so let me
just pour it in here and this will be going into an oven that is 350 degrees and you always
want to bake things by preheating the oven to the temperature that you need before you
put anything in. You don’t want to be sticking it in a cold oven and then turning it to 350.
So my oven is ready to go and this is pretty much it.

I think I will spread that a little bit in the end trying to make a little bit of a cavity in the
center because this will have very much the tendency to rise up and make a big mound in
the center and to counteract that if we can make a little concave at the center then it’s
going to be a little better so let’s put it in the oven and you’ll see it when it’s done.

My banana bread is done I’ve been keeping a close watch on it because the bread like
this. It has to cook all the way through and it will have the tendency to get brown and
make you think it’s done but you need to perform the toothpick test. We just go to the
deepest part here and of course I can’t get to the bottom of this but this should come out
clean and it does. Now I do have something I call a cake test or if you use this it will go
to all the way to the bottom and come out clean so we know that it’s done we bring it out
and put it on the mat here, turn off the oven and here you have Betty’s Banana Nut bread.

I want to show you my finished banana nut bread. Actually my husband thought it was
finished so he had a couple of slices but my intention was to put a glaze over the top of it
so I’m going to show you what it looks like and some a lot of it missing and here’s one
piece that I’m going to eat in just a second. The glaze is composed of 2 items lemon juice
and confection sugar and if you prefer you can use some kind of icing like cream cheese
frosting or butter cream icing or icing out the can or just like a plain but if you want to
use a glaze like this I would probably start with 1 tablespoon of lemon juice and 1 cup of
confection sugar.

Now if it seems too thin to spread on as a glaze put in more confection sugar. If it seems
too thick then put in more lemon juice it’s very simple recipe. I’m going you sort of a
ballpark figure of what we’re expressed is about a tablespoon of lemon juice to 1 cup
confection sugar then you can just drizzle it over the edge like this and it’s really pretty
when you cut a slice and I try to get some of that top because I love that. You can see the
texture of the cake and the topping. This is a really good combination the banana with
that lemon, that tart flavor it’s really good.