Sunday... and Monday's packed lunch

Sunday started with C and my husband making us all breakfast in bed, such a treat! We then got stuck into all sorts of other cooking and baking! My husband has prepared the meat to make our next batch of biltong (a South African dried meat), A made bread rolls and C helped me make banana bread.

Banana bread is something that so many of us enjoy eating but all recipes I’ve previously tried are full of sugar. My go to recipe in the past was a BBC recipe but was a banana cake rather than bread, and we added chocolate chips and nuts (mainly so that the children would try it). They loved it! It was light and fluffy and tasty. This time though I found a Jamie Oliver recipe for sugar free banana bread. Hmm, was this going to be a success or was A going to do his usual – have a taste and decide he doesn’t like it?! Well it worked a treat, tasted really nice and wasn’t too heavy. The children enjoyed it for pudding with some custard last night. Today in A’s packed lunch we had homemade granola bar, homemade bread rolls, a slice of banana bread and a yoghurt drink and guess what?? The banana bread didn't pass the packed lunch test :-( I was so sure I was onto a winner at last. Oh well at least the rest of us will enjoy it - and I'll try again with a bit of custard for A. One day I will get it right, fingers crossed

Banana bread ala Jamie Oliver

Ingredients:

250g Self raising flour

3 ripe bananas

2T apple juice (I used apple puree I'd made previously)

125g unsalted butter, at room temperature

2 large eggs

1/2 t cinnamon

2T honey

Method

Preheat oven to 180C and grease loaf tine with olive oil. Dust with flour

mash the peeled bananas and add in the apple juice/puree

Beat the butter in a separate bowl until creamy

Crack eggs I one at a time and keep mixing. Mix in the banana mixture and honey

Fold in the dry ingredients

Bake for about 40 minutes until cooked through

So the next step is to try again, but I will try with other types of flour rather than white flour to make it less refined and see what else it needs for A to approve...Any ideas???