The Sugar Bar

If you kept up with my Twitter updates, you may be familiar with the moments in which I was cordoning off the kitchen with police tape to protect my ripening bananas. Keeping them off-limits to the family is rather a struggle, especially when the family is quite fond of bananas, you literally have to fight and throw them off the fruit bowl. Although I was much tempted to hire samurais to guard the bloody bananas, I did not. And neither did I resort to leaving 3M sticky notes to declare my ownership of them. In the past, my sisters used to justify taking my stuff with this excuse: “I didn’t see your name on it. So it’s not yours.”; I honestly feared for my life that the bananas would become communal fruit and did consider scribbling my name in capitals on the outer skins with a thick fat black marker pen. The hilarity of it! Well, I resisted that urge as well and thankfully, on the decided day, there were 3 chubby over-ripe bananas ready to be mashed for my utmost pleasure. After nearly 22 years, I suppose the family now understand that when it comes to food, baking and cooking, I mean business and you honestly, do not want to mess with me.

Funnily enough, I’m not big on bananas. I’d eat them in cake but on its own, it’s always a begrudging affair. I have a similar problem with cooked salmon. I’d die for sashimi but poached, panfried salmon blah blah is just mediocre for me. I’d eat it cause I know it was good for me, not that I was particularly in the mood for it. So anyhow, I wanted to make a banana bread I could have for tea. And I knew it would be a great choice for a teacake since it is and will always be my mum’s favourite cake. Somehow I just couldn’t let these fabulously ripened bananas go down the traditional banana bread route. I could feel this itch to jazz it up with something diva-ish. And yes, what more could we desire for than a wicked splash of booze? I’ve got to thank Nigella for this beauty of a recipe. Initially, I wasn’t too sure about raisins in banana bread. It just seemed a little bit of an extraneous ingredient but now that I’ve tasted it, I’d say this would be one of the better banana bread recipes I’ve tried and will stick to in the future. Don’t panic, this isn’t an Adults-Only recipe as you cook away the alcohol, which adds a great bang of flavour in my opinion. Welcome to the dark side, there’s no turning back now.

The original recipe uses 100g sultanas, and chopped walnuts. I didn’t have any of the latter ingredient lying around and I wanted my banana bread to be nut-free but feel free to stick to the original recipe if you like. Because I’m still on my summer holiday before term begins late September to October, I’m pretty much doing jackshit every day. My daily existence involves lazying about watching cooking shows on Discovery Travel & Living, reading Murakami, re-decorating my bedroom, preparing lunch and dinner, etc. Really mundane things and yet, I’m quite enjoying this life and feel a little bit like I’ve walked straight out of some sort of Southern film: sitting on the front porch in an old rocking chair with a cold one and my happy chappy dog watching the sun rise and set. It’s awesome. Except I’m on the patio out in my garden by the koi pond; sitting in one of those foldable fishing chairs with a double shot Pimm’s & lemonade, a slice of boozed-up banana bread, surrounded by my family of dogs hovering eagerly around me for banana bread scraps. Not quite the same, but awesome just as well.

Think I’m lazy? I might agree. But I’m thinking since the love life took a bad turn, I deserve to treat myself and be awfully, disgustingly lackadaisical for a little while. Waking up to Chris Moyles on BBC 1 Radio and listening to the deejays chat about jalapeños and jalapeñises, participating in a ping-pong game of banter with my Northern scally friend on Facebook chat, lazying about on my bedroom floor on comfy cushions with a bottle of water, cold can of coke, magazines and books within easy reach is the life! That’s the life for now at least until I find this mundane, laid-back, sedentary existence boring, to which I’ll later find the drive to sort my life out and get with it.

Until then, I expect to be a real lazy Epicurean, whatever. Hopefully, that involves more cake posts on The Sugar Bar!

Bourbon Banana Bread
(adapted from Nigella’s Banana Bread in How to be a Domestic Goddess)
Ingredients

60g sultanas
75ml bourbon or dark rum
175g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp salt
125g unsalted butter, melted
150g golden caster sugar
2 large free range eggs
3 medium very ripe bananas (about 300g weighed without skin), roughly mashed
1 tsp vanilla

Place the sultanas and bourbon in a small, heavy-based saucepan and bring to the boil. Remove from heat, cover and leave for an hour if you can, or until the sultanas have absorbed most of the liquid, then drain.

Preheat the oven 170d Celsius. Grease and flour a loaf tin.

Place flour, baking powder, bicarb and salt in a bowl. I did not sift the flour but simply gave the mixture a good whisk by hand.
In another bowl, mix the melted butter and caster sugar, beating until blended with a wooden spoon. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then the mashed bananas. Stir in the drained sultanas and vanilla. You may add extra nuts like walnuts or pecans if you like.

Add the flour mixture a third at a time, stirring well after each addition. Pour into loaf tin and bake for 1 – 1 1/4 hr. Mine was perfection at 1hr so you might want to start watching it slightly before it hits 60mins. Remove from oven and test with a toothpick inserted down the middle of the loaf. It should come out clean.

Leave in the tin on a wire rack to cool but remember to serve this warm, with a nice cuppa tea!