Eggless Banana Bread

The girls and I made banana bread today. AJ and M&M did most of it themselves, while I helped and Baby E watched from the high chair.

The recipe is from a 1970's Sesame Street Library book, Volume 14.

Big Bird's Banana Bread

Here is what you will need:
3 peeled ripe bananas
3/4 cup honey
1/4 cup melted butter
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 big bowl
1 big wooden spoon
1 fork
1 bread pan (rub some cooking oil around the inside of it)
1 wire cooling rack
1 measuring cup
1 set of measuring of spoons

##################

Here's what you need a grown up to do:

1. Turn the oven on to 350 degrees.

2. Melt 1/4 cup of butter in a pan.

Here's what you do:

1. Put the peeled bananas in a bowl.

2. Mash up the bananas with the back of a fork.

3. Add the melted butter.

4. Add 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour, 3/4 cup honey.

5. Stir everything in the bowl with the big spoon. Stir until everything is mixed together.

6. Pour the mix into the oiled bread pan.

7. Bake for 1 hour.

8. After 1 hour, put a toothpick in the bread. Is there some bread on the toothpick when you pull it out? If there is, let the bread cook for a little while longer. If there is no bread on the toothpick when you pull it out, the bread is done! Ask your grown up helper to take the bread out of the oven. They need to take the bread out of the pan and put it on the wire rack.

10. When the bread is cool, cut it up and share it with your neighbors!

The bread is dense, very sweet and a little gooey. It holds together quite well even without eggs, because the bananas and the honey are so sticky.

We used my homemade corn-free baking powder, of course. Since it's a single-acting baking powder, we mixed together the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients separately and then stirred them together just before pouring the batter into the pan. I used a silicone bread pan, which turned out a beautiful loaf with no need to grease the pan.

The honey we used was orange blossom honey, which gave it a very nice and slightly fruity flavor (and also cuts down on the chances of their being any corn pollen or nectar in the honey). If you substituted oil for the butter, it could be a completely vegan recipe, and other types of flour could easily be sustituted to make it gluten-free.

The girls absolutely loved it, and M&M literally cried when it was gone. We shared a few slices with the neighbors and ate up the rest within minutes.

Baby E was napping, so I let the girls take a few slices over to our neighbors all by themselves. They were so cute, carrying the saran-wrapped paper plate together as they walked.

Their friend J's daddy opened the door, and they held the plate out to him, saying, "We brought you some (there was a Splat! as the bread slid off the plate) banana bread."

They all stared down at the banana bread slices on the neighbor's front porch. The neighbor, Tulip Grower Guy, said, "That's okay," and helped them pick the bread up.

I sent the girls back over with a few more slices to make up for the dropped bread. This time I put them in a container with a lid, and they arrived safely.

Now the girls want to go buy more bananas so we can make more bread.