Banana bread

Nine months ago I started making a batch of focaccia in my kitchen, and today I finished! Okay, it didn't take me nine months to make the bread, but that is how long it took us to get the oven fixed. (It's a long story, and there were mitigating circumstances.) Anyway, I felt the oven needed to be shown who was boss, so I made a point of taking up where it had so rudely interrupted me back in January, and produced a tray of focaccia.

Next up for the great oven celebration was some banana bread. I got a recipe from the BBC Food Website, and tweaked it a little. Apart from being really easy, and quite delicious, it's a great way of using up those guilt-inducing overripe bananas which everyone seems to have in their fruit bowls.


Ingredients
140 g self-raising flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
60 g butter
110 g caster sugar
1 egg
2 ripe bananas, mashed
35 ml milk
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp lemon juice

Method

1. Set the oven to 180oC, and line a loaf tin (20 cm x 10 cm)
2. Sift the flour into a bowl and add the salt and cinnamon.
3. In a separate bowl, cream together the butter and sugar.
4. Add the bananas, milk, eggs and vanilla extract to the butter and sugar mixture, and mix well.
5. Fold the flour into the resulting batter, mix well and add the lemon juice.
6. Pour the mixture into the loaf tin, bake in the preheated oven for 45 minutes until golden.
7. Allow the bread to cool in the tin for 5 minutes before transferring to a rack.