Banana Bread Featuring Homemade Butter

There are few baked goods in the world that can take a fruit and make it taste even more like that fruit.  Banana bread is one such baked good.  Once you're done baking up a loaf, your entire apartment will scream of the deliciousness that is banana bread.  I envy those who walk into a kitchen with their clean nostrils and fill 'em with the love-stank of banana bread.  It's not something the baker can experience, and that experience alone is a gift of love and sacrifice.

Anyway, the problem I seem to encounter here in Korea is that bananas tend to go from yellow to brown and covered in fruit flies in just a few days.  The best way to use them up is to make banana bread.

I have never used a more delicious and praise-worthy recipe as the one I stole from the Food Network.  It's retardedly simple, but gloriously rich, moist and fragrant.  Using homemade butter made a huge difference in that I couldn't really tell what the bread was showcasing - the bananas or the butter.  I mean that in the best possible way since I ate an entire loaf in one day and forced my sister to take the other loaf to work the next day.  Apparently, her co-workers now think I'm a culinary deity and are constructing a shrine in my honor to which they bring daily sacrifices of over-ripe bananas (to be turned into banana bread).

Ingredients:
1 cup sugar
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter (no substitutes)
2 eggs
3-4 ripe bananas
1 tablespoon milk
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.  Grease whatever pans you'll be using.

In a large mixing bowl, cream the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.

Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.

 

Peel the bananas and put them in a small bowl with the milk and cinnamon.

Mash with a masher or fork.

In another bowl, mix all your dry ingredients together - flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt.

You should have one bowl of creamed sugar, butter and eggs.  One of bananas, milk and cinnamon.  And one of the dry ingredients.

Pour the banana mixture into the creamed butter mixture and stir until combined.

 Then add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir until the flour disappears, no more.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan.

Bake for 1 hour to 1 hour and 10 minutes until a wooden toothpick inserted comes out clean.  I used a chopstick.  Cool for 15 minutes.  You can serve it right away or wrap it in tin foil.  It develops a richer flavor if you let it sit in foil overnight.