Bananalicious with Cream-cheese on top!

When I was a child, I always remember that when we had a banana or two that we could not eat on time, my mom would always bag it up, and throw it in the freezer.  It would turn totally black, and be forgotten about for several weeks or months.  Then my mom would pull out one of my favorite books.  The Joy of Cooking.  She had an early 20th century edition, and it was a very delicate book.  The cover was falling off, and the pages were falling out, making where all of her favorite recipes were.  At one point, I remember even memorizing the page number of the banana bread recipe, then taking just the page I needed out of the book, as it has long before left the binding where it found it's home.  Mom and I would bake together, bread, and muffins and we had a great time doing it together.  

Well, I am pretty sure my mom still has that book (it might be strange, but I hope to inherit a maybe one hundred year old, falling apart cook book someday), and I am half a world away, and trying to cook with 100% whole wheat.  I am not sure if that old Joy of Cooking recipe from so long ago would work right with stone milled whole wheat flour.  So, as I usually do, I went online and found myself a recipe. I found my recipe at Breadtopia: ) I had about 12 bananas on one bunch that were all going bad from the second I got them in the door of my house.  The store by me sells split and over ripe bananas like crazy.  So, I had to use them, and use them FAST.  They were turning black on their own, and didn't need any freezer help for that.  

Yesterday was a typhoon day.  There was no work or school because Korea had the strongest typhoon they had seen in a decade roll through.  It hardly hit our area, but we got the day off anyway.  So I decided since I had power, I was going to use up these bananas.  I actually made triple the recipe, so the bananas didn't go bad.  

Because my bananas were not ooey gooey and mushy, as I am used to for banana bread, and my hand mixer always throws more around my kitchen than it keeps in the bowl, I decided to mix all of my ingredients in my food processor.  It pretty much liquefied the banana, and it actually worked out really well.  I transferred the mixture into a bowl to add the flour, because there was not enough room in the processor bowl to keep mixing.

After it was all mixed, I poured the batter into a loaf pan.  One recipe worth of batter filled up one loaf pan pretty well.  

Then, this being the first thing I baked in my new oven, I kept my eye on it like a hawk.  I pulled it out a few times, and when a chopstick came out of the very center clean, I knew it was done.  And let me tell you, it was a beautiful thing!

  

This bread was not cool before it was cut and had butter smothered on top.  It definitely brought me back to when I was a little girl, and my mom and I were baking out of that old cook book together again.

I will admit, this first batch, I mixed up my baking soda and powder, and added the wrong one.  So, it did not rise quite like it should, but it still turned out amazing.  

The second and third batch I did together.  

I mixed it all in my food processor until I had to add the four, and transferred it to a bowl.  I wound up making 26 muffins 

After that, I made a quick cream cheese frosting by combining 16 oz of cream cheese to 1 stick of butter.  Once those were combined and creamy, I added two cups of powdered sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla.  

*Just a note on powdered sugar, if you don't have enough, put regular white sugar into a  coffee grinder for a few seconds, and voila!  perfect powdered sugar.  

Moist Whole Wheat Banana Bread Recipe and Instructions:

Be sure to use ultra ripe bananas for this. Their skins should be mottled black and they should feel soft to the touch. Using what you would normally consider to be ripe bananas will diminish the bread’s rich flavor.

½ cup (1 stick or 4 ounces) unsalted butter

½ cup (3 ¾ ounces) packed light or dark brown sugar

¾ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 ½ cups (~ 12 ounces) mashed ripe banana (3-4 medium to large bananas)

¼ cup (3 ounces) honey (I used sugar – works fine)

2 large eggs

2 cups (8 ounces) whole wheat flour, traditional or white whole wheat (I found that 2 cups was closer to 10 ounces – guess my whole wheat is heavy)

½ cups (2 ounces) chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 F degrees. Lightly grease a 9 x 5 inch loaf pan.

Beat together the butter, sugar, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla in a medium bowl until smooth. Add the banana, honey and eggs, beating until smooth. Add the flour and nuts, stirring until smooth. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan and let it rest at room temperature, uncovered for 10 minutes.

Bake the bread for 50 minutes. Lay a piece of foil gently across the top and bake until a cake tester (like a toothpick) inserted into the center comes out clean, 10 to 15 minutes more. Remove the bread from the oven and allow it to cool for 10 minutes before turning it out of the pan onto a rack to cool completely.

*I used Bob's Red Mill Flour in this recipe

and this really yummy vanilla that my mom was kind enough to send me from home