More Bananas

There're quite a few things I wanted to blog about, just don't know which one to write first.




Maybe I'll share about some more banana cakes and muffins recipes. Like I mentioned in my earlier post, I have been buying bananas alot recently because of XX. However, being in that 'terrible two' age, fickle-mindedness seems to be his trait and he's just shown us that bananas are no more in his list of 'edible fruits'. He holds them in his mouth and refuses to swallow them, until he is unable to contain the juices/saliva anymore and they begin to ooze out from the corners.


Anyway, I've since discovered 2 more recipes to utilise these ripe bananas which I like. One of them uses okara and that's double happiness for me, as I'm always looking for ways to use up my leftover soy residue.



Here's the recipe from Just Hungry:



OKARA BANANA BREAD


Ingredients:
1 cup dried okara
1/4 cup (50g) unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup light brown or raw sugar
2 eggs
1/4 cup milk or soymilk
1 tsp almond extract (I omitted this)
1 tsp lemon juice
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 medium ripe bananas, mashed


Method:

Pre-heat the oven to 175°C/250°F. Grease and flour a loaf pan.

Heat up a non-stick frying or sauté pan. Toast the okara, stirring frequently, until it's a golden brown in color. Let cool. (Skip this step if your okara is already in its dried form.)

Mix together the butter and sugar. Add the eggs and milk or soymilk, almond extract and lemon juice. Add the mashed bananas.

In another bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture, mixing just until it's combined. Fold in the okara.

Put the batter into the loaf pan. Bash the loaf pan hard on your work surface - this settles the batter and gets rid of any large air pockets. Bake for about an hour, until it's toasty brown in color and a skewer stuck in the middle comes out clean. Take out of the loaf pan and let cool before slicing.

I've learnt that many baking recipes uses dry okara and it also keeps better when it is drier. I've always frozen them direct (ie still wet after making the soy milk). So this time, I put them into the oven, spread out on a baking tray with aluminium foil, to dry them out. To conserve electricity, I only do this when I'm using the oven at the same time to bake other stuff. I did this over 2 occasions before the okara turned out looking like bread crumbs.





This Okara Banana Bread turned out to be as good as the first one made using sour cream. No one could taste the okara, yet it made the bread/cake just as moist. However, being a 'bread', the texture is more dense than those cake versions.








Yesterday, again laden with ripe bananas rejected by XX, I tried another recipe on Happy Home Baker's blog - Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins.





KK helped me to mash the bananas. Though he didn't at first like the idea of bananas in his chocolate chip muffins, he changed his mind after smelling the aroma from the oven and had one before dinner. Here's my little helper and his class 'pet' Olly. He's supposed to write a story about what Olly did at our house, so he's gonna write about it enjoying these banana muffins!