The Great Banana Bread Bake-Off

There is nothing better than a Sunday night baking sssh...apart from maybe a Sunday night baking sesh accompanied by the Kings of Leon! Man do I love that band and their new album is ridunca-dunculous!

One thing that our move to the Caribbean has brought about is a love for baking banana bread...why? Because your bananas don't usually last the car journey home from the supermarket without those little brown spots appearing! And everyone knows that over ripe bananas make the most perfect banana bread!

So we've been having a little bake-off in our house trying to find the best banana bread we can! A few weeks ago we made regular banana bread using my Betty crocker app. It was pretty good, but nothing compared to the insanely delicious chocolate chip and banana bread Byron made this past weekend while we were holed in for Hurricane Tomas! Oh how I wish I'd taken a picture but it was so yummy we devoured it before I even gave my little blog a second thought! We used this recipe and just added a large sprinkling of chocolate chips - it made a wonderfully moist bread that I would highly recommend.

This evening I wanted to continue testing out new recipes, and I found this beauty. Coconut is one of my favorite ingredients so a banana bread with desiccated coconut and coconut milk sounded too tempting to pass up!

INGREDIENTS
1 cup desiccated coconut
1 cup castor sugar
1 1/2 cup self raising flour
1 cup mashed banana
1 cup coconut milk
1 egg
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract


METHOD
Grease and Line a large loaf tin, and preheat your oven to 170 degrees Celcius.
In a large bowl combine dry ingredients.
Mash your banana and combine with the rest of the wet ingredients in a separate bowl.
Pour wet mixture over dry mixture and mix until combined. (it will look a little lumpy due to the chunks of banana and the coconut)
Place batter in your prepared pan and cook for about one hour until your loaf is lightly browned and a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.
Allow to cool in pan for 10 minutes and then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.


The smell that comes from your oven is quite amazing! and the taste is even better! 'Try it Edward, you'll like it!'