Daddy and Charity Bake Banana Bread

Dad and Charity getting ready to bake

******WARNING this post contains a large amount of photos******

[I decided to make this more a photo essay, but every now and then you might see some narrative. 🙂 ]

Well in an attempt to keep a certain  someone occupied and make sure that my wife got a break, I had to come up with some other things to do.  We had some bananas that were “on their way out” and attracting some very annoying fruit flies.  I hate fruit flies.  So I came up with a solution that solved many problems at one time.  If I made banana bread that would take care of the bananas.  If Charity helped me that would keep her occupied and my wife could go and take the break that she really, really needed to take.  The finished product would also be desert  for after dinner and, of course, enough would be left over (from two loaves) for a midnight snack!  Woo Hoo!

Here is Charity ready with the mixer. Watch out ingredients

The "offending" bananas

I had to  figure out which banana bread recipe to use and that involved first deciding

which recipe book to use.  My wife, thankfully, made this part a little easier for me.  One of the books had the ingredients already doubled (good thing since I wanted to make two loaves of banana bread) and so figured that was the one she used most often.  I love it when  a plan comes together.

Preheating the oven to 350 degrees

The ingredients all in the mixing bowl and ready to mixed

This was also part of Charity’s school for the day (in case you haven’t guessed, we home school) so she was helping me with the measurements of the ingredients and then she was determining (by means of subtraction) how much we still had to had of certain ingredietns.  She did a fantastic job.

Charity mixes the ingredients after we add them to the bowl.

After all of her math, Charity was rewarded with the  privilege of mixing the ingredients together (which had to be mixed at speed #2 on the mixer for 2 minutes.  I also tried to capture this in move mode.  I’ll try to put a link to the video below, but I’m not sure if it will work here or not.

View the Mixing Video here

Now the ingredients have been mixed and its time

This photo (taken by Charity) is of the mixed ingredients just before being put into the bread pans.

to put them into the bread pans!

Oh my I forgot all about the bread pans and have not even prepared them!  We to use stone baking pans because the cook more evenly.  (Is that true, not sure but it sounds good).

OK… got the pans ready and now its time to put the batter in.   Well a still picture would not do that justice, so its time for another movie!  My camera lady (Charity) is ready so here we go!

Click Here to see this exciting process!

In the oven and ready to go!

The “loaves to be” are now in the oven on the top rack and ready for some serious baking.   Its already beginning to smell like banana bread.  Can’t wait until the real thing actually makes it out of the oven……Patience……Patience

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Oven timer is set for 55 minutes

Charity enjoys the beater! Her "just desserts" after a job well done

mmmm! Thats good stuff.....

Really good!

Here we are half way thorugh the baking process. Looking good.

Just out of the oven and piping hot!

Out of the bread pans and onto the rack. Can't wait to eat it!

And eat it we did!  Although I did not  photograph it… we had banana bread for desert after dinner and boy was it good.  It was good enough that I even didn’t mind sharing half a loaf with friends and having them be too critical of my cooking experience.  Wonder what  we’re going to bake tomorrow!