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If you open my freezer at any given hour in any given day in any given week you’ll find over ripe, frozen bananas.  I haven’t thrown a banana out in years.  Just so you know that I’m not talking about a yellow banana with some brown spots…here’s what I speak of….

I have been trying banana bread recipes for years – sometimes they rock, sometimes not so much.  Last Christmas I was given a fantastic cookbook called Flour (thank you Ty!).  The author owns a bakery by the same name in Boston.  I’ve never been to heaven, but I’m guessing it tastes like their chocolate croissants (that recipe is in the book too but it’s actually easier and faster to fly to Boston and eat one there).  I digress.  You only need 3 bananas for the bread but I had close to 20 frozen (i’m bananas too) so I decided to double the recipe (i could have tripled it but then that would really be bananas – sorry). As with everything I cook – I tweaked a bit from the book.  We like to go heavy on the cinnamon and vanilla in our house so I doubled that amount, I didn’t have walnuts so I used pecans, I didn’t have any creme fraiche so I used sour cream and I threw in some chocolate chips at the end for the hell of it.  Here’s what you need for the bread….

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon (or if you’re me, 1 tablespoon)

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar

2 eggs

1/2 cup canola oil

3 very very very ripe bananas

2 tablespoons creme fraiche (or sour cream if you’re not fancy)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract (1 tablespoon for us!)

3/4 cup nuts

First you’ll need to sift all the dry ingredients (flour, salt, cinnamon, baking soda)

Then in a bowl whip together the eggs and sugar (is it throwing you off that the pictures show twice the amount of stuff listed? no? good.)

Then whip that baby on medium speed for at least 5 minutes (if you are doing by hand it’ll be closer to 10 – which will explain why I chose to NOT do this by hand). Once it’s nice and fluffy – turn the mixer or your hand on low and slowly add the oil.  Mash up the bananas and roughly chop the pecans (or your choice o’ nuts).  I put mine in a ziploc and wack them with a mallet.  It does the job and releases stress.

Put the banana mush into the wet ingredients and then combine with the dry

Stir just enough to mix together

At this point in the recipe I remembered to preheat the oven to 325.  Feel free to do that in the beginning if you want to do things the right way.  Pour into your desired cookware.  Since I was making enough to feed a village I used 5 mini loaf pans.  Disposable, foil pans that don’t need to be buttered – not good for the environment but oh-so-good for the lazy baker.

For laughs – I did a couple of loaves with semi-sweet chips, two others with just pecans, and one with both.

Then it goes into your nicely preheated oven for an hour.  Yep – a whole hour.  Don’t be tempted to take it out early or else you’ll have some extra goo in the middle of the loaf.  Goo.  That’s a professional baking word.  These need to rest for another hour after they come out.

And, truth be told, they taste much better on day 2.

That’s 9:47 am on a Sunday in case you were curious.  At 10:47, when these babies were done, so was I.

I didn’t do another productive thing all day! Wasn’t this enough?

and this