When the bananas turn brown

You know the saying when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Well, when your bananas become too ripe, then you make banana bread of course! I know I already did a Tuesday Treat this week so this post is some extra special baking I had to do because the bananas were becoming too brown.

The recipe calls for walnuts, but I prefer chocolate chips so I substituted the walnuts for chocolate chips and it turned out perfectly fine! 

First, gather your ingredients. 2 cups flour, 1 tsp baking soda, 1 egg, 1 cup and 2 tablespoons of sugar, 1/2 cup of vegetable oil, 2 tablespoons of buttermilk (I used low fat milk if you don't have buttermilk on hand), 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract, 3 mashed bananas (as you can tell I only used two). If you want the walnuts, you need 1/2 cup and 1/3 cup of chopped walnuts (toast them if you want extra yumminess!)

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees and prepare your bread pan (I used a 9X5X3) by lightly greasing then flouring it. Mix the flour and baking soda together in a small bowl and set aside, it will be added later to your wet ingredients in the mixer.

In your mixer, pour the sugar, the oil and crack the one egg and mix together. 

Then add the flour mixture you prepared earlier and give it a really good mixing in your machine, definitely don't forget this step, but not too much mixing that it is overmixed. 

Then mash your bananas up in another bowl, giving them a good mashing. 

Once the bananas are thoroughly mashed, add them along with the buttermilk and vanilla into your mixer. Especially during this step, mix all the ingredients together very well! If you need to stop the mixer and scrap the bottom and sides of the bowl, definitely do this.

At this point if you are adding chocolate chips instead of walnuts, add them in now and then mix. 

If you want to use the walnuts, I will describe how to add them in a bit.

Get your baking pan and add the entire contents of the bowl if you put in chocolate chips. 

If you wanted to use the walnuts, add half of the batter into the baking pan. Then sprinkle 1/3 cup of walnuts. Then add the remaining batter and sprinkle the 1/2 cup of walnuts on top. Bake your banana bread for 45-60 minutes or until a skewer or toothpick comes out clean. Let the banana bread cool in the pan a bit before you take it out of the pan. Then slice, eat and enjoy! And tell me how good you thought this recipe is :-)

And a quick shout out to my Sean who bought me these beautiful flowers, thanks love!