You Pinspire Me
I have tried a lot of recipes, crafts, and products from Pinterest. Up until now, I have only blogged about things that turned out exceptionally well. I have decided to change that. I haven’t had many spectacular failures, but there are many that just don’t have remarkable results. If I can help someone else avoid a mistake, shouldn’t I?
Earlier today (while still in bed, actually), I pinned this ‘super easy’ Banana Bread recipe.
I did, in fact, make it today. The recipe is simple, but the photo should really include eggs, as that’s the 4th ingredient in the recipe. It didn’t take long to put together, but then again, neither does a normal banana bread recipe. The recipe made one small and one medium sized banana bread loaves. As the bread was baking, it smelled far less like banana bread and much more like a boxed cake (go figure!). I used 4 bananas, but I knew when I smelled the air that I should have gone closer to 6.
The cake – as I’m calling it now – came out beautifully – it looks pretty, and it slid out of the pans nicely – but…. it tastes like a slightly denser yellow cake with a hint of bananas. The chocolate chips also sank to the bottom half of the cake, too – normally I would have tossed the chips in a tsp of flour before adding them in, but I didn’t have the flour out since I wasn’t using it in the recipe. In hindsight, I should have set aside a tsp of the cake mix, but I didn’t. I also should have doubled the amount of chocolate chips.
Don’t get me wrong – it doesn’t taste bad – it just lacks the essence of banana bread. It’s not dense and moist, and it leans to more of a cupcake flavour and texture. I normally love my banana bread heated just a touch with a bit of melted butter – but I would feel weird putting butter on this cake. And it is easy – but not that much easier than a basic banana bread. And don’t get me wrong – I’ll still eat the loaf that I’ve already cut! However, I might save the other in my freezer until I have to bring a meal to someone next – it’ll make a nice dessert to go along.
My advice: If you’re going to go through the work of turning on the oven, greasing and flouring pans, and getting a mixing bowl dirty, just put in the extra 5 minutes and make this Banana Banana Bread, which has over 7,000 reviews and a rating of 4.5/5 stars at Allrecipes.com. It’s just not worth cutting corners on this baked good.
Jenn vanOosten
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Maybe it would make a good cake and bake it in cake pans instead?