Chocolate Ginger Banana Bread

I don't know why I didn't think to combine these three of my favorite things before - chocolate, ginger and bananas:

But a friend shared a quickbread recipe for just that. All mixed up and ready to go:

It didn't last 24 hours. And I didn't share!

Buttermilk Banana Bread

I am forever cursed with bananas too brown for me to enjoy. Not that I mind.

This time I added pecans and used some buttermilk:

Next time, a little more green on the ends - or baked. I don't mind:

Blueberry Banana Pecan Muffins

Blueberry muffins. I can't ever resist:

I also added some mashed banana to this recipe - any variant on a banana bread is fine by me:

The resulting batter looked...curdled, if I'm being charitable:

The resulting muffins, though, made for a delicious breakfast!

Banana Bundt Cake

My love of green bananas has been documented before, so I am sure it is no surprise to see me mashing slightly brown fruit to make a Banana Bundt Cake. This is another great banana recipe from Dorie Greenspan's "Baking."

Beauty and the Feast was headed over to bake with me, so I set out the ingredients after my bananas were mashed:

This is a fairly standard cake recipe - the butter is creamed with the sugar, and then the dry ingredients are added alternately with the wet. Once all of those items are incorporated, the bananas are mixed in, leaving the batter a bit chunky:

This cake would also bake beautifully as a loaf - the top is decorative enough to not justify greasing all of the grooves of a bundt pan:

The turned out cake was sliced right away and eaten warm!

Black-and-White Banana Loaf

Don't let the title fool you - this is really a pound cake:

I like bananas, but only before they turn brown. Because of this, I'm always looking for new uses for old bananas. My mom bought me a fantastic cookbook by Dorie Greenspan - "Baking: From My Home To Yours" that contains more really amazing banana recipes in one place than I have ever seen. Here are some of my assembled ingredients: vanilla, eggs, milk, bananas mashed with lemon juice and rum, a mix of flour, salt and baking powder, softened butter, and brown and white sugars. I find that a recipe proceeds more smoothly if most of the ingredients are measured before you start, even if it means doing a few more dishes.


Here is the first addition to flour to most of the wet ingredients. the flour was added alternately with the milk. After that, the banana mixture was added in:

Here are the two batters - on the left, melted chocolate and butter mixed into  little less than half of the basic banana batter:


And here is the dough, marbled in the pan before baking!