I'm going to start with the ingredient and instruction list and then tell you what I did to it to make it dairy-free, and to kind of mess everything up bad. And I just realized something else I effed up. This is going to be the worst bread ever. Hopefully future me will come back and tell everyone how good it is. Future/present me is saying you will have to read to the end to find out. Future me is kind of a b****.
From The Country Fair Cookbook:
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened (used margarine)
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups mashed ripe banana (3-4 medium)
1/2 cup buttermilk (almond milk and vinegar)
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 cup chopped toasted walnuts
1 cup fresh blueberries
Cream butter with sugars in mixing bowl. Beat in eggs, banana, buttermilk, and vanilla. Combine four, baking, soda, salt, and nutmeg in separate bowl. Add to banana mixture with walnuts and blueberries and stir gently, just until all ingredients are moistened; do not overmix. Bake until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean, about 1 1/4 hours for 9-inch pan or 1 hour for 8 1/2-inch loaves. Cool 5 minutes, then remove from pan and cool completely. Keep tightly wrapped and store in fridge for easier slicing.
Note: Toast walnuts in 375F oven for 5-10 mins, stirring 3 times while baking.
Preheat oven to 350F. Grease bottom of pan or line with parchment.
Now that the boring part is over, I am going to tell you all what just happened to me. First, I went grocery shopping for these things last night. Of course you can't get ripened bananas at the store, they throw those away, so I did the shortcut. I put my oven on the lowest setting and put them on a baking sheet and left them in there. I intended to pull them out when they started getting brown, but I needed to make a store run for mint (for mojitos!) and vinegar (to make buttermilk). The mint was not to be got for love nor money, and I was out entirely too long looking for it. I came back to completely brown bananas. Life is so hard. I threw them in the fridge, although in hindsight I should have done the freezer to make them stop browning. Needless to say, that didn't work so well.
Next, I made some almond buttermilk. One recipe called for 1 cup almond milk, 2 tsp white vinegar, and I did that originally. I made 1/2 cup to 1 tsp ratio. Then I looked at other websites and they recommended a 1 cup/1 tsp ratio, so I added more milk and figured I'd save the other half cup for another time. Nope, that did not happen. I put the entire cup in. I have no idea how that will affect the recipe, honestly. Now another stupid I pulled. Our newest member of the brunch group is very allergic to nuts. I remembered to leave out the walnuts, but I completely spaced that almond milk is made out of a nut. I am the worst nut ever.
So otherwise I followed the recipe to the letter pretty much except when I forgot to add the brown sugar until after all the other wet ingredients had gone in. Good job me. Oh! I don't own a mixer, so creaming butter by hand is hard. Confession: I used my smoothie blender for it. It kinda worked. Here is what it all looked like when I put all the ingredients together:
And what it looked like after I mixed it gently:
So I "lined" a pan with parchment paper. It's surprising I have such a weirdly specific cooking thing, am I right? I don't have a mixer, but I do have parchment paper. It's because I have a friend come over to bake a lot. She asked me to keep it in my house. I guess it's convenient. Anyway, I put most of the mix into a 9x5 pan, but it seemed like it really filled it up, so I put the rest in another greased 9x5 pan, and then decided that one didn't have enough so I scooped more mix into it. I'm going to have some very stumpy bread.
Update: The smaller loaf is done and it is not so very stumpy. I think I made the right decision, because the bigger loaf rose more than I expected. It still needs about ten minutes.
Update the second: Both are done and here is a picture!
Parchment paper was a bad idea. I just don't have the skills to make it smooth so it shaped the bread weird. Also you can see where I sliced in to the farther loaf. I was eager to see how it would taste and I just couldn't wait for brunch tomorrow to find out. So how is it?
I'm not going to lie, I want another piece and it's taking all of my self control not to eat more of it. I looooooove banana bread, and despite all of my brain farts, I managed to bake some really good loaves! It is very very moist (but not wet or unbaked), maybe a little bit too much so, but I actually think that's a good thing rather than a bad one. So there you have it, friends! Blueberry banana bread, win.
Also, I lied. My kitchen is still a mess.
I just served this at brunch to raving results. My friends said it was some of the best banana bread they had ever had, and putting in the extra buttermilk made it really good.
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