Banana Bread

When life gets bananas, make banana bread! This recipe uses applesauce in place of most of the oil to provide a lighter texture with less calories. It's practically health food 😉

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Prep Time 10

Cook Time 45

Course bread, Breakfast, Snack

Cuisine American

Ingredients

3-4 ripe bananas depending on size
2 large eggs
2 Tablespoons oil
½ cup unsweetened applesauce
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
¾ cup sugar
2 ½ cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
½ teaspoon allspice

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 °F.
Mash bananas and mix with eggs, oil, applesauce, vanilla and sugar.
In a separate bowl mix together flour, baking powder, baking soda and allspice.
Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients in two or three installments, mixing well between each addition.
Pour into a greased loaf pan and bake for 45-50 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
Cool for about 10 minutes and remove from the pan, then cool completely before slicing.

Notes

If you don’t have allspice, you can substitute cinnamon instead. It won’t be quite the same but will still taste good!

To make muffins instead of a loaf of bread, fill muffin cups 3/4 full and bake for 18-20 minutes instead. Makes about 12 muffins.

Keyword banana bread, quick bread, quick breakfast

For a taste of fall, check out our Pumpkin Bread!

Obligatory Fictional Backstory

I live around the corner from someone with almost the same address as me – ending in Avenue instead of Lane. As such, we often get each other’s deliveries when enthusiastic shippers click the first address that autofills rather than type out the whole thing. So naturally when I received a shipment of 500 bananas, I assumed that they must be for my neighbor. He has a rabbit and as everyone knows rabbits love bananas.

So I called him up and said hey, I just got a shipment of 500 bananas are they for Buster? And he said no, Buster died last week and I haven’t had the heart to get a new rabbit yet. So I called the shipping company and they said oh yes, there was a mistake but there is no way that the bananas will still be good if we come get them and deliver them to where they were supposed to go originally so you can go ahead and keep them.

After wandering the neighborhood like a deranged door – to – door banana salesman trying to pawn off bananas on all of my neighbors and cursing the fact that it wasn’t closer to Halloween so that I could hand out bananas to all the trick – or – treaters (though that would create a whole new set of problems because what kid wants to get a banana in their treat bag?? imagine the pranks…), I was able to pare down the stash to about 100 bananas.

My kids mowed through about 70 of them before they moved on to apples, which still left me with enough bananas to try 10 different variations of banana bread. This banana bread recipe was the winner. Enjoy.

Also enjoy this comic that I think of whenever I say the words “banana bread” from https://inkyrickshaw.com/ – and be sure to check out his page, it’s full of hilarious stuff like this!