Banana Bread Supreme indeed!

I am more of a baker than a cook. This is the one thing I inherited from my mother, who was always baking things from scratch when we were growing up. (lucky me!)

If you are like me, you love a cup of tea and a little snack for morning tea. Just a little something to keep the 'think tank' going until lunch.

I'm a huge believer in home made food from scratch. You have control over every aspect of the ingredients and you know what's in your food!

In recent years with all the fuss about sugar and 'white foods' I've been trying to tweak a few recipes to add nutritional elements.

Two things that I've been changing with my baking is reducing or replacing sugar and seeing what I can substitute for anything that calls for vegetable oil.

This recipe calls for 1 c of sugar. I recently read that you can cut the sugar in any recipe and hardly notice the difference. So, I've changed that to 3/4 c of sugar and I use half rapadura sugar and half regular white sugar.

The rapadura sugar is an unrefined ingredient made from cane juice. It tastes more like molasses and gives the bread a lovely darker crust. (Using very ripe bananas will also add to the sweetness in this recipe.)

The other ingredient I add is greek yogurt. The original recipe called for sour cream.

I now use greek yogurt for EVERYTHING that originally calls for sour cream and that includes as a condiment for mexican food. Nobody in my family has ever noticed the difference and it works great in baking too! In fact if you have a muffin recipe that calls for oil you can replace it with the yogurt.

(Another little secret that my family don't know about is adding chia seeds. I grind a tablespoon in a coffee grinder and add to the batter. Chia seeds are packed with antioxidants, fibre, protein and Omega -3 fatty acids.)

So, here you go!

Banana Bread Supreme

1/2 C butter
3/4 C Sugar (1/2 rapadura, 1/2 white)
2 eggs
3 small mashed bananas (you can use defrosted bananas from your freezer)
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 C greek yogurt
2 C plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 Tbs of white chia seeds ground (shhhhhhh!)
walnuts to stir in the at the end (do not use if putting in your child's lunchbox!)

Cream together butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla. Beat in bananas. Slowly add in flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt mixture. Mix until moist. Stir in nuts with a wooden spoon, just before baking. Grease a loaf tin. (I usually make one standard size loaf with nuts and one small loaf or a few muffins with no nuts for the kids.)

Bake at 180/350 degrees for 45 min or 160/325 for 60 min. The loaf is ready when you can stick a knife in and it comes out clean. (Cool on a wire rack.)

You can enjoy this warm, cold or toasted with butter. I usually keep it in the fridge after it is cooled.

I hope you enjoy this. If you make any other 'tweaks' to the recipe or know how to make it gluten free, let me know.

See you soon,

Heather xoxo

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