I went grocery shopping a little while ago and bought some bananas and as humans tend to do, we let them start to get too freckly for out liking. I felt a strong connection to the rapidly ripening bananas at this point, because I too get very freckly in the summertime. "Bananas, I'm here for you," I said, to which the freckly bananas said nothing because bananas can't talk. If they could though, I can imagine they would have encouraged me to bake them into banana bread so they would have served some warm and delicious purpose in their short little lives, just as we all hope to some day (...weird) (sorry).
I have a go-to banana bread recipe that I have used for years which, as it turns out, I haven't made a blog post about to link here, but maybe I will one day. Anyway, this time, I decided to finally try out a new one. Joy the Baker (who Lauren and I love) (you should listen to her podcast) (really really you should) has a recipe for chocolate bourbon spiked banana bread which sounds nutty even before finding out that the recipe has actual nuts in it.
I didn't have bourbon (nor did I know anything about bourbon) and I didn't have walnuts, so I replaced them in the recipe with rum (leftover from a previous baking adventure for one of Lauren's birthday cakes) and pecans, so I guess now I've created a new recipe (with an excessively long and confusing title).
I really don't know if rum is considered a substitute for bourbon in baking recipes, but the end result is really good, so I'm going to say yes. I should probably just Google it. Or Bing it if I'm going to be that girl. Someone named Joe C says yes that's okay in a Yahoo answers thing, so I'm going to trust him because he sounds like a trustworthy guy.
The recipe has lemon juice in it which isn't something I've ever found in a banana bread recipe before. I really liked how this recipe turned out. So did my dad. So did Leo, when I accidentally dropped a crumb on the ground and then rushed to retrieve it from his silly little mouth (Leo is a puppy, not my brother or something, because that would sound quite strange if you didn't know).
I made it in a round cake pan instead of a loaf pan because I like the way things look when cut in wedges. Also, I like when my sandals are wedges. I suppose that part is unrelated to the recipe.
This recipe is more cakey and less bready than the other recipe I've used. I just found out that my computer dictionary doesn't think "cakey" OR "bready" is a word, which is weird because I use them both just about every day, if not every conversation.
You should make this if you have freckly bananas on your counter who feel worthless:
2 cups of flour
3 teaspoons of baking powder (Isn't that just a tablespoon? I don't understand why it's written like that.)
1/2 teaspoon salt (I used kosher salt and a little more than the recipe called for because that's how I roll)*
1 stick of unsalted butter
1 cup of sugar
2 eggs
about three ripe bananas, mashed (or 1 1/2 cups)
1 teaspoon of lemon juice
3 tablespoons of rum
1 cup of pecans (I left them whole but you could chop them or draw a little face on them with one of those edible ink pens or whatever if you want)
1 cup of chocolate chips
I mixed all the dry ingredients together and beat the butter and sugar until fluffy (or about 4 minutes) in an electric stand mixer. Then, I beat in the eggs, one at a time. I stopped the mixer to scrape down the sides of the bowl and added the bananas, lemon juice, and rum. I turned down the speed of the mixer to low and added all the dry ingredients. Then, I stirred in the pecans and chocolate chips with a spoon, and poured it into a greased round cake pan. I baked it for about an hour, possibly a little less, at 350 degrees (F).
*I'm a little disappointed that this recipe isn't for rolls because that would have been such a great pun.
Cheers!
-Spencer
What I'm listening to right now: Like The Wheel by The Tallest Man on Earth
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