Moist Banana Bread Recipe

I have really bad luck with recipes. I tend to pick the ones that have errors in them. For instance, I made a Fruit Cobbler on the weekend that just happened to have the flour component missing. What I thought was a fortunate find (I had just ran out of flour) turned out to be a very sweet fruit soup/slop instead of a delicious fruit cobbler.

However, I did end up with one successful baked good before my fruit disaster. Here's a Moist Banana Bread recipe that works! I made some mistakes while baking it, but it still turned out yummy. I like forgiving recipes.

MOIST BANANA BREAD
Printed from COOKS.COM

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1/2 cup butter

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 cup flour

3 large very ripe bananas
1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 cup walnuts or semi-sweet chocolate chips (optional)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees farenheit. Grease the loaf pan.

Ensure that the butter is room temperature (not frozen) before you begin. Cut the butter into the sugar to break it up. Beat sugar and butter together. Add eggs and keep beating until small peaks form.

Sift dry ingredients together and add to egg mixture. Stir in mashed bananas, chopped nuts and/or chocolate chips (optional), and vanilla. Mix thoroughly, but don't beat. Pour into greased loaf pan.

Bake at 375 degrees farenheit for 1 hour.

Notes:

1. I made two loaves and one loaf only had 2 bananas. To make it less thick, I added 2 tablespoons of water. It worked out just fine.
2. This banana bread tastes good with walnuts or chocolate chips, but you don't have to add those if you don't want. Note that the chocolate chip version will be sweeter, so you can reduce the sugar if you want it less sweet.
3. This recipe originally had 1 and 1/2 cups of sugar in it and my family thought it was too sweet. I tried it with 1 and 1/4 and it was still too sweet (especially with chocolate added), so I have reduced the sugar amount to 1 cup only now (June 2011).
4. I messed up on one batch and added twice as much butter as needed. The result was a very rich, dense banana bread. It wasn't bad, but your arteries wouldn't thank you. (June 2011) If you're using margarine, don't increase the amount. The result is a very greasy banana bread. You're better off to reduce the margarine amount instead to get a lighter banana bread.
5. (June 2011) You can safely increase the amount of bananas to 3.5 bananas. You can also safely add half an extra egg. I tried this on a recent batch.

Enjoy!

Last bake-tested June 21, 2001.