Baking extravaganza and special banana bread recipe!

Having been unable to do any baking for a while I went into mass production mode when the lovely Tesco's delivery man brought me all my basics with the grocery shopping....

First of all I made about 2 dozen of these -

I got the recipe here, from Land Girl 1980's blog, recently discovered on one of my many late night blog crawls!
They are WW2 scones, flattened into cookies. I did make some scone sized versions but fell in love with the crunchy outer texture and decided biscuits were the way forwards!  I did make some slight amendments from the original recipe by adding some cinnamon (about 1 tsp) and some raisins and sultanas (a few handfuls, I didn't really measure them, just dumped a load in ha ha!) to the mix.
They are best fresh from the oven but will go soft (still really yummy) after a few hours. This might be because I don't have a biscuit tin to put them in. I will have to either dig out an old tin from somewhere or splash out in Poundland ha ha ha!

Later on in the day I made two massive banana breads, one chocolate chip and banana, the other sultanas, raisins, cinnamon and banana. I had a lot of bananas to use up!

Still munching on the banana and chocolate one, great with some cold custard. The other beast was given to some dear friends as sustenance whilst in the process of moving house :)

 

 On the left is the chocolate, the right is the cinnamon.

How to make your own banana bread beast.....

First of all, the measurements are in American cup sizes (my scales are broken so I'm using cups at the moment) which are different to UK cup sizes, this useful site has a converter that will convert specific ingredients from cups back into ounces or whatever conversion you're after.

I also used a 4.5" by 8.5"  (I measured the top, the bottom is 3.5" by 7.5") loaf tin, greased and with a small rectangle of grease proof paper (also greased) in the bottom.

You will need -

3 or 4 bananas
1/3 cup of melted butter
1 cup of sugar (I used granulated)
1 egg (large, free range)
1 tsp of vanilla essence

1 tsp of baking powder
Pinch of salt
1 1/2 cups of plain flour

Instructions -

1. Preheat oven to 175c fan oven, adjust accordingly for a non fan assisted oven.

2. Mash up the bananas and mix in with the melted butter

3. Mix in the sugar, egg and vanilla essence
4. sprinkle on the baking powder and salt and mix in.
5. Add the flour, sifting in a little at a time until everything is mixed in together.
6. For plain banana bread, stop here. For chocolate chip banana bread, add in as many chocolate chips as you like, really is up to you how chocolatey to make it. I used a chopped up bar of luxury cooking chocolate that was already in my cupboard. For cinnamon banana bread, add in about a 1/2 a cup each of sultanas and raisins, then a tbsp of cinnamon, add more for a stronger flavour.

Cook for about 1 hour 15 mins - 1 hour 30 mins, check by sticking in a skewer or knife, it should come out clean/ with a little bit of melted chocolate on. If it doesn't, whack it back in for a little while.
If it's finished then carefully turn it out onto a clean tea towel, peel off the paper, flip it over onto a cooling rack and then see if you can let it cool down for a bit before getting stuck in!