A Special Treat

Today is your lucky day! I am going to share our families best loved recipe. I have been making this since before I was married. It is moist and yummy and wonderful. You might want to grab a napkin, 'cause it's gonna make you drool...

Tracy's banana bread! It's not your average banana bread though, I promise. I made up a recipe card for my files so I figured I would share it with my readers. You should be able to click on the photo for a larger view.

The recipe is pretty straight forward but I have some tricks that make it the best! First of all, your banana's should be near rotten. I mean it! The banana's in the photo aren't bread worthy yet, they need to get quite a bit darker. To the point where you think it's time to throw them out. The really, really, really ripe bananas have the most "banana" flavor. (now, if I am eating a banana, I like them almost green but that is another story)

My next tip is to only use a mixer for the creaming of the butter and sugar. Do the rest by hand, it makes it so you still have small pieces of banana in the dough. It's a good thing.

The last big thing is to bake them into 4 mini loaves. After 100's of loaves of bread I have determined that baking 4 mini loaves keeps them moist and baked just right. All that batter in a regular loaf pan takes so long to bake that the top gets really dark and the loaf starts to get dry. I happen to use a Pampered Chef mini loaf stoneware pan but have had equal success with individual mini loaf pans. You can see my PC one is getting very well "seasoned".

Now, my guys prefer that I throw in a handful of mini chocolate chips. Actually, they have become so spoiled they won't eat plain bread anymore, lol. I prefer some chopped pecans in my bread but I am outvoted 3-1. If you use the mini loaf pans you can customize different fillings to suit everyone in the house.

You can see that the recipe calls for buttermilk. The buttermilk and real butter are what give it such great flavor and moistness. If you are out of buttermilk, then mix 1 tsp vinegar into 1/2 cup of milk. Almost as good!

Let me know what you think.

I have finally decided on a method of storing my recipe cards. I will share about that in a future post.