Blueberry Cranberry Banana Bread
This banana bread only involves a hand mixer, 1 small bowl & 2 medium sized bowls. Mm, sometimes you’d need to take comfort in baking something simple to serve with a delicious cup of coffee or in my case, lactation tea. (Note: affiliate link to something I’ve been trying and it works! Clicking on it doesn’t cost you anything, but I would make a small referral commission from your planned shopping on Amazon.) I have been so enthralled by parenting a newborn, which can explain my hiatus. Anything more complex would require extra pair of hands!
Despite the sleep deprivation, baking with a baby will require you to be mindful not to leave your batter on a preheating 350°F oven. You might want to take your butter or margarine out way ahead of time; if you had forgotten, just cut them in cubes to speed up the process. Get your eggs out to room temperature. If you are also a parent (of baby or of the furry kind), it isn’t crazy to talk to them what you are doing to let him/her know they aren’t alone. Plus, it would give a cooking show kind of feel, with a very petite audience. (Why not start them young?) My dog would walk away though if you weren’t giving her any crumbs.
Mashing bananas in a small bowl is cheap therapy. Noshing on a slice of freshly baked banana bread evokes memories of baking banana cakes with my mom. Mom has been very kind with helping us out with preparing meals as we were getting used to baby life. She taught me how to make vinegared pork hock, which I will share in a subsequent post.
Mom bought so much blueberries since she can’t get it in Brunei. Blueberries are a great fruit source of iron, which helped me with recovering from being dangerously anemic. Eating pumpkin seeds, alongside with drinking juice with added Vitamin C, is great too as it contributed to 30% of my iron needs. My midwife had thought I was naughty skipping my iron supplements entirely, but I passed the blood test.
I had so much dried cranberries on hand. They do help enhance the texture of the banana bread.
Banana Bread VARIATION:
You can easily substitute blueberries with any fresh fruit of your liking. You could opt to add white chocolate chips in lieu of dried cranberries.
When Mister (the hubby) tried this banana bread, he asked me where I found this recipe. (Yay, this recipe is a family keeper then.)
Accreditation of this banana bread recipe:
You can’t reinvent the proportions of fat to flour to sugar. The banana bread recipe was inspired by and adapted from a June 1983 printed Lougheed Women’s Institute cookbook (ISBN: 0-919673-41-4). It was a marriage of two recipes (by Jerry-Lynn Burden & Linda Johnson Osbak). I wanted a moist banana bread, so the structure was more of Osbak’s. It uses more fat, but less flour. The words in the recipe are of my own.
Notes on the recipe:
-Bananas do oxidize (turn a browner colour). If you want to get a golden brown colour like how I photographed, you will want to mash your bananas just before adding to your batter. Otherwise, you can add 1/2 tsp of lemon juice or vinegar to stop the bananas from browning. Not a huge deal though! It would still taste great.
-This recipe is flexible. (Which banana bread recipe isn’t?) It doesn’t really matter too much if you used salted or unsalted butter. Since we’re on a tight budget, I’ve actually used Imperial margarine for this recipe.
-Your bananas should be ideally 75% speckled with black/dark brown spots for your bananas to be “ripe”.
- 1 cup sugar
- 2/3 cup butter room temperature
- 2 eggs brought to room temperature
- 3 bananas ripe and mashed
- 1 tsp vanilla essence
- 1/4 cup blueberries fresh
- 1/2 cup cranberries dried
- 1 1/2 cup flour all-purpose
- 1 tsp cream of tartar
- 1/2 tsp Salt
- In a medium-sized 3 quart bowl, beat sugar and butter until creamy with a hand mixer on moderate high speed for about 3 minutes.
- Add 1 egg and beat with the batter from Step 1 on a low speed. Add the other and continue beating.
- Add mashed bananas and vanilla to the batter and continue beating on a moderately low speed.
- In a separate medium sized bowl, mix your dry ingredients together with a fork or whisk: flour (unsifted is fine), cream of tartar and salt.
- Gently stir in dry ingredients using a rubber spatula from Step 4 to your batter in Step 3 for a maximum of 2 minutes. Add blueberries and dried cranberries and continue folding/stirring for 30 seconds or less. (Optional: in lieu of dried cranberries, use white chocolate chips.)
- Bake at a 350°F oven (176.667°C) for 45 minutes or until a skewer comes off clean.
OMG! This combination is great! I’ll have to try it! Thanks for sharing
Thank you! Blueberries go very well with bananas. 🙂
You are doing great, mama! I made my first meal postpartum yesterday, and that was 6 weeks after he was born!! I had to breastfeed in the middle, so I learned the importance of a mise en place so everything can finish quickly once you start.
So true! It seems like we have to plan everything ahead.
I often have to make quick meals (usually noodles tossed in a pan, with a sunny side egg) when I’m by myself since I get hungry so easily! (Breastfeeding does that!) Yep, a lot of nursing breaks in between cooking/baking.
This looks fabulous – and with a newborn? Well done! Bookmarked!
Thanks, Mardi!