Happily Managing a Household of Boys: Banana Bread Baking Day

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Banana Bread Baking Day

I love Banana Bread and so do my boys. I found an awesome deal on very ripe bananas late last week. A local grocer had single bananas 10/$1. I purchased 20 very ripe bananas just for baking and 15 bananas for eating.

I wanted to try several different recipes since I had so bananas, so I went to some of my favorite recipe sites and found some recipes. I found 4 different recipes and I added them to my SpringPad account, so I could access them from my smartphone.

I began yesterday afternoon around 12:30pm with mashing all 20 bananas. The first recipe I decided to use was for 2 loaves of Banana bread. I made one the loaves plain and to the other I added in Chocolate Chips.

The second recipe we made was for Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins. Our family loves muffins, so I thought this would be something different and tasty for us! I doubled the Muffin recipe so we can get 24 muffins out of it. I really went "different" with the 3rd recipe which was Banana Pineapple Bread. Let me just say on this one: "Don't knock it until you try it", "You will be pleasantly surprised". By now it was dinner time and I really wanted to just be done, so I used the 4th recipe BEST Banana Bread or Muffins. This recipe rendered us 3 full sized loaves and 6 mini loaves. It was just regular banana bread.

Pics from our baking day:

We tried "samples" from all the recipes and all of them were hits!! The Banana Pineapple Bread I was not sure about when I read the recipe, but it had rave reviews. The reviews were spot on! It is delish!! The Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins are outstanding! Both recipes for regular banana bread are awesome also!!

I don't have a chest freezer YET, so we shared some with my dad and some with a lady from church. We are freezing a couple loaves for us and the rest are going to go to our church for their Food Ministry they have. The Food Ministry provides meals for families in need: Illness, new baby, Grieving and more. I will put them in the freezer at church and they can add them to the meals as a snack bread!

Banana Bread Baking day was a very inexpensive day considering the "haul" we had at the end. The bananas were $2 and I have all the rest of the ingredients on hand. I buy our flour in bulk at Sam's Club for $7 for 25lbs. I am sure the total cost for all the ingredients I used was not more then $15!! That is about .30¢ a piece for what we ended up with! LOVE IT!!

I had so much fun baking banana bread, that I hope to do it again very soon! We will be getting a small chest freezer when we get our tax refund and I can't wait to begin stocking our freezer with goodies!