My Dad's Best Banana Bread | Christine Cushing

[Music] hi I'm Christine Cushing and welcome to another special edition from the quarantine kitchen of recipes that I want to share with you simple feel good because we all need to feel good by the way how you doing are you cooking I know you're cooking everybody on the planet is cooking right now even Michael Buble and his wife are cooking although I don't think they're gonna be cooking what we are about to be cooking I'm gonna go really nostalgic on you today with probably one of the most famous recipes from my dad his name was Tony so we are gonna make his famous banana cake so many great little tips along the way and fun stories that I want to share with you because it's all about the fun and nostalgia and baking today all right let me just show you bananas to make a great banana bread for me you got to go with the brown brown brown bananas so it's got to be super super ripe overripe in fact for eating my husband always takes the overripe bananas and puts them in the freezer as a hint to me to make more banana bread so this is how I like them this was frozen so I just wanted to show you the kind of stage that I like to use them at and in fact when you use just a relatively ripe banana so that's not overripe you're not gonna get the same level of sweetness and those same tropical notes so I always like to kind of go a bit overboard and it's a way to not waste bananas especially nowadays right so I got three bananas don't fret the whole recipe as always is gonna be below the description so I'm literally gonna just mix in this bowl the wet ingredients so bananas a couple of eggs going in a little bit of vanilla and I'm eyeballing this but I encourage you not to do this 1 teaspoon of vanilla pure vanilla extract this one is particularly double-acting here's a thing that I love to use I have it in my fridge it was kind of running low so I want to use it up this is apple butter so again for this recipe in this series it's all about using everything we have apple butter cuz I get a lot of questions about it is a reduced essentially apple puree and they add some spices to it so those warm spices could be cinnamon cloves things like that if you don't have apple butter you can always use maple syrup you can use honey or what I wouldn't do is use apple sauce so the difference mmm that's good concentration of flavor the difference with apple sauce is apple sauce is much wetter so it's gonna make your banana bread super wet we don't want that so here's wet ingredients the other ingredient that I'm going to add is the butter so this is just melted unsalted butter going in there right now looks pretty just basic not too many complicated things in here and it's all about the ease of this recipe okay so wet ingredients there now the one thing that my dad did with this is in addition to all these wet ingredients I'm gonna add the sugar to that so this is a dark brown sugar I use all natural I don't pack it down it's just loosely packed you'll see that in the recipe going in if you don't have brown sugar you can always go with you can go with white sugar and add a little bit of molasses so essentially that's what brown sugar is brown sugar is sugar the way it's supposed to be and when they remove the molasses then you get white sugar okay those are wet ingredients now let's do a little swap a rama for the dry i always love to sift with this sieve it aerates the flour it catches any little debris that's in there so going in with an all-purpose flour and a couple of leaveners we're gonna go with baking powder baking soda both can 11and anything with some acidity so brown sugar has a bit of acidity that's why we add the baking soda i'm also add quite a bit of cinnamon my dad maybe went even a bit crazier than this with the cinnamon but really it's up to you and always a pinch of salt which I'm putting outside actually it's a half teaspoon salt because it's not gonna go through the sieve and now we sift and see those little just Falls there by sifting you really aerate and the texture of your cake or your banana bread is gonna be that much lighter that's why I love doing that so now I have a couple of really cool things to show you so here are my dry ingredients cinnamon already to me it's all nostalgia this really takes me back to my dad making this recipe he made it so often and not actually when I was a kid but more as a teenager because he was in fact a really I called him the accidental Baker because he never kept recipes he was always just throwing stuff together I'm gonna get back to that the last little spice I'm gonna use is this so check that out have you ever seen that before this is another bit of nostalgia for me it's taking me back to the time when I was in Malaysia and I actually picked this from a tree I had never seen it the way it grows look at that so cool this is actually let me just reveal it for you we're gonna do a little hopefully it's gonna work are you ready do a little smashing okay that's perfect so this is the outer husk of nutmeg so in addition to this part what's around it is the mace so the mace comes off and then you have this other extra shell is that cool or what I didn't have any clue about that until I actually went and picked it and saw it actually looks like a pear when you see it on the tree it's crazy so that is some fresh nutmeg how cool is that so I always suggest using fresh nutmeg because when you use an already grated nutmeg the flavor is gonna be so much more diminished eyeballing this - so fragrant because this came right off the tree and this is the place where you want to have these beautiful spices right warm spices bananas brown sugar come on it's gonna make you just melt so now let's go back to Tony why was he famous why was this banana cake famous he never kept recipes and when he started to bake he went back to cooking school actually to learn how to bake because he's so bad at it like notoriously bad and when I tasted this banana cake the first time banana bread I said oh this is amazing like how incredible is it and then my husband called me one day and said okay I just tasted the most amazing banana bread your dad made it and I couldn't stop eating it so he said you have to make it you have to get the recipe I said good luck with that and he laughed he said well what are you talking about I said he has no clue of the recipes like never keeps a recipe so I asked him no clue of the recipe so I actually interviewed him to try and get it you know did you use two eggs three eggs I think two you know and that's how it all went but here's the kicker the process so after I got it all written down the process of making it it was so non-professional that I would have never come up with the system so I tried to make it you know how you would make it in a commercial kitchen and it wasn't that great so I went back and I said what's up but I did everything you said so here's how he mixed it check it out he got your wet ingredients you got your dry ingredients here's the special tool see that baby yes potato masher so what did he do he said I just put everything in the bowl and I match it with a masher so I'm like all right in 50 years I would never come up with that so thankfully I asked him and he told me and that's how this recipe was born because I was actually able to create a recipe using his technique without professionalizing it that's what's so great you talk about homey recipes so what the potato masher does is it actually leaves some texture in the banana and mixes everything I mean it's completely contrary I'm telling you as a chef no way you just would never do this it made no sense you know I was beating butter and sugar together just screaming and he's like no no you don't do that no matter with you so this I think is nicely blended now guess what you add this whole wet to the dry again with the potato masher but I do want to make sure I get all of the liquid here and we mash the key here is not to over process this so you don't want to overwork that flower and by the way if you can't find all-purpose white flour you can absolutely make this with whole wheat flour it will actually be even way more nutritious and the bananas can hold it you know the bananas give you enough moisture that it's not gonna be dense and dry and I just want to work this until the flour I don't see any more flour almost like making a muffin but not really it's a little bit more than that let's go around here and let me make sure I've got all of that blended do I yes I do that's looking perfect the aroma this is crazy crazy crazy good and really what's what our recipes for for me recipes aren't for sharing and this is the whole point I mean this is a really really special recipe to me and my dad I mean whenever he made this we would go crazy and he made it for quite a few years so I want to pass it along to you you can spend you know some great times with your family especially now kids it's super easy you don't even have to use a mixer so that's why I wanted to share it with you I think this is the time to really pull out the heavy nostalgia and also improvise using whatever we have available I'm using small baking tins like this for a couple of reasons they're gonna cook more quickly and then I can have you know a few loaves one can go in the freezer and I don't have to worry about it taking so long to cook sometimes in a big loaf pan the outer part gets too tough by the time the inside cooks so that's why I like to go with three you can also do it in a cake pan very very again improvise as you would like to so I'm just going to divide it among these three here look at the color of that brown sugar apple butter so good and those spices mm-hmm I'm already imagining this we want to make sure they're even but we're gonna eyeball it this is nothing you know this is not going to be anything complicated as you can see the question is how long will three of these last in your house okay I think this one is going to go in here not as even as it could be so make sure that it is this one has a little bit more my oven right now is set at 350 and that's a still setting no convection no fan so the rule of thumb is when you're baking any kind of cake or something like this you want to keep your oven still just because I'm being finicky now I want to make sure those are even so just tap them down a bit and into the oven they're gonna go who wants a banana cake who wants some of Toni's famous banana cake 350 the recipes gonna be there I'm not gonna really tell you how long it just depends until they're done they want to when a tester goes in they need to be the tester needs to come out clean so three little banana breads coming out soon okay thirty minutes they should be almost done but I want to do a little test just to make sure because there's so many variables including let me just see I just want to insert a toothpick in the center I can tell comes out clean they're bouncy these babies are good so they're coming your way here we go oh look at those I love the three little ones look how cute they are so great already I feel good smells good too so I gotta let these sit for just a few minutes before I can flip one out and show you what they look like but that is perfect banana bread ah so good intoxicating ridiculous all right this is why we're all here I'm gonna flip one of these babies out I just wanted to let you know there's still a little bit cool like a little bit warm so ideally what I want to do is kind of cool these down but because I use this non-stick pan it's nonstick little guy here they come out super super easily so if you don't have non-stick baking loaf pans you want a butter and flour these I didn't mention that before so that they come out nice and beautiful like that so again this is a little bit hotter than it ought to be I would cool it down fully here but I can't wait I'm impatient I got to show it to you it looks so great that is what I'm talking about right so now I want you to see what all the fuss is about hello right there is Tony's famous banana cake booyah okay you got to get the pot water you want to make some tea want to make some coffee I'm coming over with the banana cake what are you waiting for oh I can't I forgot okay you're gonna make it and have your own tea have your own coffee and I'm gonna make mine here but I want to taste this for you because look at how moist and tender that is right it's still warm but look at that that's what a great banana bread looks like phenomenal it's just the perfect level of sweetness fragrant with all these beautiful spices so tender and delicate you're gonna lose your mind over this you were gonna lose your mind you want to make this right away thank you so much for joining me in my quarantine kitchen today so we can reminisce about my dad's absolutely amazing very famous banana bread recipe please stay well let's keep together in the kitchen we're gonna get over this thing join me again very soon for another helping in the quarantine kitchen please thumbs up subscribe share let me know what's happening in your kitchen see you next time get that coffee get that tea on

Channel: MyFavouriteFoods ChristineCushing

Views: 164,727

Rating: 4.8805971 out of 5

Keywords: Christine Cushing, My Dad's Best Banana Bread | Christine Cushing, MyFavouriteFoods, banana bread, banana dessert, best banana bread, wallofchefs, comfort food recipes, foodnetworkcanada, cookwithme, banana bread recipe, dessert, how to make banana bread, bananaloaf, oliveoil, evoo, nutmeg, bananas, allpurposeflour, eggs, cinnamon, brownsugar, butter, Easter, walnuts, bananacake

Id: _jCH8ngkNzQ

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020