Banana Bread

I walked through the door yesterday, having had a few days away on a business trip, to find a fruit bowl full of bananas, many of which were looking very much past their best. Although not my first priority - that went to having a power nap having had 3 hours sleep prior to travelling for ten hours in hot and sticky weather - I decided that the best solution for some of the riper fruit was to make banana bread and so that is what I did last night.

I found myself in a similar banana situation at Christmas when I managed to order twice the quantity I needed and only had half the people around to eat them. When I asked my Mum for suggestions as to what to do with the surplus she had suggested banana bread, not least because it freezes well. The advantage of the freezing bit is that you don't just end up eating a load of cake in place of a load of mushy bananas.

Anyway, this great suggestion had clearly stuck with me (well, Mums often know best) and so I dug out my 'usual' recipe, which happens to be the BBC Food Gluten-free Banana Bread one.

It calls for cherries but I only had a few of the glace variety so used these instead.  I also recalled reading that 'most chefs agree' that cutting up to a third of the sugar in a cake has no impact on the flavour, it may just make the cake a little less moist. With all that mashed banana I thought I may be fairly safe on the dryness front so cut the suggested 110g caster sugar to 85g.

With the mixture safely in the tin, the oven still warming and three more rather dark looking bananas I decided to quickly whip up a second loaf. This time I replaced the cherries with some chopped mixed peel and kept the sugar content to 85g.

I had heated the oven to the suggested 180C and set the timer for 1 hour 20 minutes before going to cool off in the garden. I'm not sure if I should have set the oven to a slightly lower temperature because it was on a fan setting or if the lower sugar content meant the cakes cooked a little quicker but I sort of wish I'd taken them out about 5-10 minutes earlier. However, no one here is complaining.  The cherry one was a little less brown so that has gone in the freezer and the citrus one is already proving very popular.

As for the lower sugar content, I can honestly say I think it's perfectly sweet enough and think I'll opt to add less sugar to all my bakes from now on.

Mind you, having done all that there are still about ten nice yellow bananas in the fruit bowl so it'll be bananas chopped onto some sort of cereal for breakfast for the household a few days yet. Unless, of course, my Mum has any other good ideas...?