Banana Bread With Cream Cheese Frosting

I love baking and I’m always looking for new recipes to try especially since I take the yummy baked goods to my vets office- I like to use them as my guinea pigs and they very happily volunteer their services plus they love it so much that sometimes they don’t charge me for my visits-they totally rock!

Here is a recipe for Banana Bread that I found. It was super simple to do. The cream cheese frosting isn’t part of the recipe but since I had some left over from the cupcakes I made I threw it on one of the loaves and it was delicious! I used my cell phone to take the picture so it’s kinda dark.

The recipe is for two loaves and it came out super moist and delicious. I practically ate one loaf myself. I absolutely love banana bread. The recipe suggested adding some chocolate chips into the batter and I did that to one of the loaves but to be honest I didn’t care for it much because it took away from the banana flavor, after all, it is banana bread-right. But if you try the recipe let me know what you think. 

Ingredients:

• 1 1/4 cups sugar
• 1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups mashed very ripe bananas (3 to 4 medium)
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 1/2 cups Gold Medal® all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Directions:

1. Move oven rack to low position so that tops of pans will be in center of oven. Heat oven to 350°F. Grease bottoms only of 2 loaf pans, 8 1/2x4 1/2x2 1/2 inches, or 1 loaf pan, 9x5x3 inches.
2. Mix sugar and butter in large bowl. Stir in eggs until well blended. Add bananas, buttermilk and vanilla. Beat until smooth. Stir in flour, baking soda and salt just until moistened. Stir in nuts. Pour into pans.
3. Bake 8-inch loaves about 1 hour, 9-inch loaf about 1 1/4 hours, or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes. Loosen sides of loaves from pans; remove from pans and place top side up on wire rack. Cool completely, about 2 hours, before slicing. Wrap tightly and store at room temperature up to 4 days, or refrigerate up to 10 days.

Makes 2 loaves (12 slices each). Here is the original Banana Bread recipe.

Enjoy!

Irene