Grandma’s homemade banana bread recipe.

Come. Pull up a chair. Let me tell you a story about a visit from the Cake Fairy

First confession, the title is click-bait (of sorts).  My grandma couldn’t make banana bread as good as this despite her prodigious culinary talent.  Nor could Mom.  But ‘Grandma’ and ‘Mama’ sell recipes.  Think of me instead as the ‘Cake Fairy’—one of my ‘real’ incarnations.

For someone who doesn’t love bananas, to eat them, for their drying and mealy consistency, and who really can’t stand banana flavour, it is amazing that this recipe is the ultimate expression of banana and is truly a wonder to taste.  Whenever I bake it, no matter how many loaves, it is gone in a flash.  My children will devour an entire loaf before it has even cooled, and be well into the second one before the next day rolls around.

I have owned two very significant properties in my life.  On one, we grew apricots.  Dry climate, seasons.  Another story.  On the property where I truly got to know bananas, I grew tropical fruit and raised bees in over 1,000 acres of paradise.

When you have roughly 20 varieties of bananas growing, and the abundance is so extreme that there is always excess, you learn to do things with them.  We had lots of opportunity to play with recipes, varieties, and so on.  The bananas that we grew tasted like nothing I have ever encountered before.  The rich, organic soil, and biodynamic farming methods, resulted in all of our fruits having a flavour intensity that haunts my dreams.  Should you ever be travelling through Central America and come across a perfectly ripe manzano banana, buy it, eat it on the spot. Ambrosia.

If you intend to make banana bread, or banana cake, then buy a lot of bananas and set a bunch aside to “rot”.  It takes an intrepid kitchen warrior to put up with fruit flies, completely brown skins, the seeping and fermenting liquid that leaks from bananas.  To help keep bug from fruit, cover with a cheese cloth leaving plenty of air space.

They should be completely black and starting to shrivel a bit.  The flesh, when you peel the fruit, should be translucent and very, very soft.  Do not discard the liquid.

Here is the recipe.  A version of this recipe also appears in one of my books, a book about the feeling of an endless Sunday, lingering with the paper, an Indian Summer day, no reason to be anywhere, to do anything, and some lovely friends and food.  

Incidentally, each of my children, on turning 13, received a personal cookbook from me.  I wrote down all of the recipes that they had individually loved and cherished growing up.  Each had their preferences, whether that was for birthday cake, pasta, meat, whatever.  They are love letters to my children.  Like Noah’s ark, they carry so many dreams and shared moments, passion, happy memories, but are also a bark for their own creativity, a time capsule, a love language, and a life lesson that will hopefully guide them to create magic bubbles for their children to grow up within.

Now that they are adults or very nearly so, I love that they cook from their books.

The Cake Fairy’s Banana Bread

You can freeze banana bread easily until you need it.

I like to use completely overripe bananas–the skins turned completely black, and the weight of the fruit reduces by nearly half.  This concentrates the flavour intensely.  All ingredients must be at room temperature. The butter should have the consistency of cold cream.

Pay attention to the consistency of the batter.  Bananas vary tremendously in terms of water content, and atmospheric conditions will also change things.  A banana bread batter needs to be firm, not quite dry, so that it will rise properly and hold without collapsing. This can mean a lot of flour. The last time I made banana bread, the bananas were still so wet, and the orange so juicy, that I had to add 200 g more of flour.

• 450 g pastry flour, plus extra to adjust for moisture of batter
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 tablespoon of baking soda
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 1 teaspoon of freshly ground cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon of an equal blend of cloves, nutmeg, ginger and cardamom (ground fresh this is 6 pods of white cardamom (or 4 of green), 5 cloves, 1/2 of a nutmeg nut, and 1 teaspoon of fresh powdered ginger or 2 tablespoons of grated ginger pulp)
• 200 g butter at room temperature
• 300 g cassonade or demerara sugar
• 4 eggs at room temperature
• Juice and zest of 1 lemon or of a half lemon and one navel orange
• 1 tablespoon of vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons of whiskey, bourbon, cognac or spiced rum
• 600 g of overripe bananas, about 8 to 10
• 150 g of pecans, chopped or whole

All ingredients must be at room temperature.  Preheat the oven to 170°C/325°F/Gas Mark 3.  Thoroughly butter and flour two loaf pans (glass is ideal).  

Combine all dry ingredients except sugar and mix thoroughly.  Cream together sugar and butter until fluffy, about 5 minutes.  Add the eggs, one at a time, and continue mixing.  Add in vanilla, zest and juice, and liquor. Blend in the bananas until smoothe.

Thoroughly mix/fold in dry ingredients with a spatula, ensuring there are no pockets of flour, but also that the mixture is smooth. Fold mixture into prepared pans.  Bake in the middle of the oven for 45 minutes to 55 minutes, or until a tester comes clean from the middle.

Cool the breads on wire racks, inverting from the pans after 15 minutes or so.  Allow to cool completely before slicing.  Simply divine.

Chef’s Tips

You have considerable latitude in ingredients used, for instance, nuts or not…I like pecans, but some prefer walnuts and others none at all.  Macadamia nuts are also good.  We always have ginger pulp to hand as a by-product of juicing fresh ginger or from making ginger ale or distilling ginger for the essential oil, and I keep it in a container in the fridge to put in lots of things, cookies, cakes, but also stir fry and other dishes.

Some people also prefer less spice which will bring the banana flavour more to the fore.  I like this particular level of spice.  Also, dried coconut has been sometimes added; I prefer it without.

I really love the taste of the orange that comes, but you also need some of the lemon juice for the acidity–finely grated zest is also a must. You want untreated lemons and oranges.