From The Kitchen: Whole Wheat Banana Bread

I love banana bread, not banana nut bread, just banana bread. In fact I’m from the camp that says you shouldn’t put any nuts into any type of baked goods (the only exception I’ll make is macadamia nut cookies). Back to the subject at hand, I love banana bread. And of all of the banana bread recipes out there, my favorite one is the one my mother-in-law makes. She knows how much I love it and pretty much every time we see them she makes it for me, isn’t that sweet? She also gave me the recipe a long time ago and so I’m going to share it with you!

One of our wedding presents from Jason’s parents was a cookbook filled with our favorite recipes that they make for us. His mom also passed it to my mom and had her write our favorites in it too. I didn’t know it at the time but it has turned out to be one of our favorite gifts we received and it certainly has gotten a lot of use from us.

The very first recipe in the book is the banana bread recipe :) I told you she knows how much I like it!

I asked her where she got the recipe and she said it came from Cook Book of Breads by Sunset. I think it is now out of print but you can see it and find used copies at Amazon, check it out here. Okay, here we go…

First, gather your ingredients:

1/2 cup butter

1 cup sugar

2 eggs slightly beaten

3 medium sized bananas (best when they are a bit brown so they are squishy) mashed

1 cup white flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon soda

1 cup whole wheat flour

1/3 cup hot water

Melt the butter and blend in sugar.

Mash your bananas and beat your eggs (separately).

Mix in the eggs and bananas into the sugar/butter mixture. Blend until smooth.

In a separate bowl, combine the dry ingredients together, white flour, wheat flour, soda, and salt.

Add the dry ingredients to the previous mixture, alternating with the hot water. Do not beat batter very long, just enough to thoroughly combine ingredients.

Grease your pans. We like to use one 6″ pan and two 3 3/4″ pans. If you put it all into just one large pan the outside gets done before the inside. Using smaller pans does the trick :)

Pour the batter into the pans. Bake at 325 degrees for 50-55 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. If you do decide to use a 9″x5″ loaf pan, bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes.

I let mine cool in the pans…

And then I eat it :) This super tasty bread sure doesn’t last long at our house. To make them last a little longer we wrap them in cling wrap and then aluminum foil and freeze the extra loaves. When they thaw out they are just as good. Smother a few slices with butter and it’s even yummier. Writing about this delicious bread makes me want to go have some right now, in fact, I think I might :)

Enjoy!!