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Sunday 25 May 2014

Overly ripe bananas

What to do with overly ripe bananas? I always seem to get too many bananas - not matter how many of few I buy - there's always a couple I've not finished off.  This week I had 3 sitting on my desk and work that were really starting to smell, as well as a couple hanging up in my fruit basket that had seen better days.

In the past I've made banana breakfast muffins, and banana loafs with various different recipes, but I wanted to try something different this time - because to be honest - trying to eat that many muffins or that much loaf, and you end up wasting even more food than just the bananas! (Although I've just had an amazing idea for a banana bread and butter pudding now....that would work right?)

So, distracting from new ideas, and focussing on what I've actually made, I've been invited round to a friend's for tea this evening. Her husband is away, and she's babysitting her kids, but she fancied a bit of adult company as well (with me? ha!) but she's offered to cook something special for tea and I'm bringing the pudding.

Usually, I stick to just basic bakes that I know, even though this blog was meant to be about trying new things. So I sat down with my recipe books last night, looking for banana type things that were above and beyond the basic loaf/muffin variety, and cake across a banana pudding.  This from the book Stacie Bakes, which was a gift from my friend, who's also a baking blogger BareNakedMummy.

At the start of this bake, I had the worry that I didn't have the right size dish again (see my last post about brownies and dishes), and also, knowing that I had to carry it around to my friends as well, so I actually did some measuring, and found a lovely little casserole type dish that also has a lid on it.  (Are you impressed I actually did the measuring this time!)

This is one recipe I haven't been able to locate online, but the book is still available and I throughly recommend treating yourself to it!  The basic ingredients were flour, baking powder, bananas, maple syrup, caster sugar and brown sugar. There's probably some other stuff as well (book's back on the shelf now, sorry).

First off, you make up the batter and mix in the mashed bananas, and pour this into your dish.  Then you make up the butterscotch topping. I didn't quite read the instructions correctly (always leaping a step ahead), and mixed the maple syrup in the the dark down sugar. I think it would have worked out better to have sprinkled the sugar on, then then dribbled the maple syrup. Still I had fun licking out that bowl! (I may possibly be on a sugar high for the rest of the day...). I don't think my order of ingredients mattered too much though, as I then added boiling water to the whole mix and popped it into the oven.

It has been suggested this looks more like a rum liquid, then sugar and maple syrup, but I think my version is gonna taste scrummier (hopefully...)


After around 40 mins of baking, it's all puffed up and looks like this. The smell is just amazing! I wish I could capture that on the blog :)

And here's the final piece:


It's meant to be served warm, but as it's for tea this evening, I've just had to sit and stare at it.  I've covered it over now, and it has sunk a little bit,  but am sure we can heat it in the oven or microwave later.  Hopefully it will taste as good as it smells.  I'll report on that later - may be amend the blog with pics of the inside too. I need to serve it with custard, I'm really bad at making sauces, that's one thing I've never got on with, but I'm tempted to try and make custard from scratch, mainly because I went all adventurous and made maple syrup meringues to go with this pudding (because it really needed more sugar?) and now have some egg yolks wondering what I'm going to do with them....

Meringue post up next :)

1 comment:

  1. That looks yummy - if it wasn't for the bananas....

    BNM

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