going bananas

i was inexplicably hit with a craving for banana nut bread last week.  super random, right?  but remember - although i despise fruit in its natural state, pureeing it and mixing it into sugary, delicious baked goods is perfectly acceptable in my eyes.  so on a trip to the grocery store, i picked up a few to ripen and mash.

finding a recipe i wanted to try was another story.  the google, as usual, came through and i settled on this one, which boasted giada's stamp of approval.  if it's good enough for that bratz doll-lookalike, it's good enough for me.

reading the comments on recipes is always helpful, and quite a few commented on the fact that this one required the eggs and sugar to be whipped together for ten minutes (a-whaaa?).  the bean was napping (with the tv on for background noise), i had time to kill, and i got to work.  well, the kitchenaid did, anyway.  and at the end of that ten minutes, the mixture was light and fluffy.  interesting - i've never made anything with a base like this before.

while i waited for that to be done, i measured and sifted the dry ingredients together and mashed up the fruit.

i didn't want to make the bread in loaf form, because then that requires cutting, which in turn results in a dirty knife.  remember, i'm lazy as hell.  so to simplify things and make nice little servings, i lined my silicone cups with cupcake papers and used my ice cream scoop to fill them with batter.  25 minutes later, i pulled out this pan of fragrant goodness:

by this time, the bean was awake and although i tried to pass these off as cupcakes, she wasn't having it.  "what's that smell?" she asked.  and i couldn't lie to her, so i said "it's banana cake!  doesn't it smell good?  wanna share one with me?" and she turned up her nose and flounced off to the living room, where she was going through her halloween loot from school.  drat, foiled again.

but that didn't stop me from grabbing one for a taste-test.  i flipped it out of the silicone cup, peeled off the liner, and broke it in half.

looks good, right?  and i gotta say, these came out beautifully.  i'd debated making a light glaze to drizzle on top, but they're just sweet enough, with a lovely moist [shudder] texture likely due to that whipped egg and sugar combo, as well as the applesauce i'd used in place of the oil.  i ended up with almost two dozen of these, and with just me and the hub around to eat them, i'm going to pop half of 'em into the freezer so we can enjoy them at our leisure.

i'm getting pretty smart in my old age.