Where did I find this tasty treat?
This is another find from Recipe Girl. I was inspired to make this after spotting a couple sad looking bananas sitting on my counter. We have very different opinions in this house about when the most appropriate time to eat a banana is. Matt eats bananas the second they turn yellow. I’m more of a wait-until-they-have-a-couple-brown-spots banana eater. But these 2 sad looking things had gone way past a couple brown spots and more into…”these were yellow at one time right?” territory. It didn’t take too much convincing for me to settle upon this recipe. Nutella + banana bread, obviously I’m all over that!
I got 99 problems and Baking is one.
This recipe actually wasn’t so bad. Honestly, I’ve made banana bread before, so it was pretty smooth sailing. With just one exception…the recipe said “beat at low speed until flour is incorporated (don’t over mix”). So I start incorporating the flour, but, wait, did I mix that enough? What does over mix mean? How do I know if I over mix…my guess is when I do realize what it means, it’s going to be too late!?!?! ACK. Basically this sort of freaked me out so I sort of used the mixer for a bit, but then stopped and used my spoon because I was afraid if I stuck with the mixer I’d end up “over mixing”.
Lessons Learned:
- Banana bread + nutella= OMGFREAKINGAWESOME
- This sort of make me think that I should start eating banana & nutella sandwiches.
- I still don’t know about over mixing. I’m not sure what it means. But I can say that I didn’t over mix this bread.
Over mixing developes the gluten in the flour, making your baked good chewy-think crusty bread vs. banana bread. The best way to avoid it is to mix by hand and only until the flour is barely incorporated-white streaks are okay.
Ah makes sense…I guess if I wasn’t so hatefully lazy I could have done a bit of digging and figured that out.