Emptying the Pantry - Part Three: Chocolate Banana Bread

I am particularly proud of my second foray into my EtP Challenge - every single ingredient here was already in the cupboard or the fridge/freezer.

I got the recipe from the AWW website. They have this nifty meal-maker recipe widget (I don't care if it's a mis-use of the word, cos I love that word), which as it turns out is very helpful when you need to find a way (actually, several ways) to use up an entire kilogram of wholemeal flour in a few short weeks!

The sea cucumber-looking things wrapped in plastic haemmoraging a mysterious pale brown liquid are frozen bananas. I put them in the freezer back in January because they were starting to turn and I knew I wouldn't have time to eat them fresh (they get to a certain point and the ethylene that is produced as they ripen makes me gag), and I LOVE frozen bananas in summer - they taste great and are far better for you than icecream. But this is a prime example of why you shouldn't leave things in the freezer forever...

Wow, I'm really struggling to keep my leftover Spaghetti Bolognese (sort of) down...

I feel a little Haiku coming on...

The banana wilts

Quietly, the girl vomits

Structureless and soft.

Oh no, no no no, I didn't mean that. As if I would ralph into a mixing bowl. Into a wok, maybe. A biscuit tin, perhaps. Actually, I have done both of those things (sometimes, when you're camping, you've gotta do what you've gotta do). True story. And colossal overshare. But no, not into a mixing bowl (maybe only because I don't bring them camping?). No no no, that's mashed banana! There's a fresh one in there too.

Heheh. This just keeps getting better. At this point I feel that it is only fair to inform you that this is a combination of banana, castor sugar, oil and egg. Nothing more.

I really am doing a top job of convincing you to try this recipe out, aren't I...

Anyway, this is where it gets confusing. See, I greased and lined my loaf pan like the instructions said.

This, by the way, is a virgin loaf pan.

Ne'er before had its smooth curves been filled by the soft warmth of a rising loaf. Grant bought it for me and it made me ridiculously, deleriously happy. Yup, I'm the kinda gal that gets excited over a $9 loaf pan. I really am that easy to please! FYI, he gets me way better stuff than $9 loaf pans too, but I just thought I'd use it to illustrate the point that the simple things in life - kitchen utensils included (especially) - make me happy. Oh, remind me to tell you a story about my awesome new vegetable peeler! It's called "The Piranha", and no, I didn't name it myself. But that's another story for another time.

Yes, I really am that sad.

Anyway, back to the instructions. I greased it like it said. And then I poured it in, checked the instructions again to see how long to bake it for, and went "uh-oh..."

I mean, I couldn't see a reason that the batter should go into two bar pans instead of one loaf pan (and I never realised there was a difference between a bar pan and a loaf pan, although having just Googled it, a bar pan isn't at all what I think it is - some idiot has patented something that looks rather a lot like a lamington tin that had a baby with a Swiss roll tin, and called it a small bar pan. Freak. I would have thought that a bar pan was a skinnier loaf pan with straighter sides, kind of like in the AWW Birthday Cake Book, you know the pan that makes up the #1 numeral cake (wow, having sourced that link, that cake looks exactly the way I remember it!)? But apparently not) - the batter came about 2/3 the way up the tin, which is about right for a loaf batter, but I put a Swiss roll pan on the shelf below it, just in case it oozed over and things turned ugly.

Lucky for me, things didn't turn ugly. No, they turned quite beautifully, in fact.

And delicious.

PS - there's butter on it because I feel that few baked goods are complete without butter in some form. That is all.