December 17th – moist, sweet and delicious!

“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!”… For quite some time now, I have been craving to bake a banana blueberry bread and now that our bananas sit overly ripe in the back of our fridge, it was time to pull out the bread tin! Banana blueberry bread brings a lovely Christmas smell to the kitchen from the cardamom and vanilla. I’m a real sucker for cardamom! You can also use cinnamon in the mixture if you please. Banana bread is so versatile with its flexibility to change, you can alter the sweetness with honey or sugar and incorporate the flavour with nuts, dates, jams, figs or berries. I’ve decided to use blueberries and nuts with a hint of vanilla flavour. I added a bit of sugar to this recipe, as my sweet tooth was craving for a more sweeter version this time. Banana bread is easy to make, it takes under 10 minutes to whip the dough and about 50 minutes to cook. Hopefully this recipe will bring you a little bit of Christmas spirit, share it with your loved ones, family or just all alone under a blanket with a good book.

Ingredients

1. 4 ripe bananas, the darker the better (dough)  + 1 banana for garnishing
2. 1 dl organic honey
3. 2 eggs
4. 2 tsp baking powder
5. 2-3 tsp cardamom
6. 2-3 tbsp sugar (optional)
7. 1 vanilla pod seeds
8. 1/2 dl coconut oil
9. 6 dl flour/ oat flakes (I used 3 dl flour & 3 dl of a mix of oats)
10. about 3 dl fresh blueberries
11. generous pinch of Maldon salt
12. 100 g roughly chopped nuts (I used cashews and walnuts)

• Sometimes I add apple sauce/juice or milk  to the mixture if the consistency seems to dry

Directions

Preheat your oven to 175 Celsius degrees. Melt the coconut oil into liquid from its solid form. In a large bowl, mush 4 bananas with a fork. In this case, the darkened overly ripe bananas are the best as they are much sweeter. Add 2 eggs, honey and the oil. Mix.

In another bowl, add all the dry ingredients (flour, chopped nuts, cardamom, oats, salt, sugar, vanilla seeds, baking powder). Mix the dry ingredients with the banana mush and stir well into a dough. If the mixture is too dry, add a tablespoon or 2 of milk/jam/juice to gently loosen it. Carefully mix the blueberries into the dough.

Take a bread tin and line with baking paper. Place the dough into the bread tin and press the halves of a sliced banana on top for garnishing. Brush a bit of oil on top to prevent them from burning. Place into the oven for about 50 minutes. Leave to cool and enjoy as a snack. Store it wrapped in some baking sheet in the fridge.