Buttermilk Banana Bread!

I'm trying to bake a lot more this summer. To help get me back into a groove, I started small. Peanut butter bananas dipped in dark chocolate (a slightly messy no-bake--see photo at end). Refrigerator cookie dough into chocolate chip cookies. Then a Pecan Pie from my holiday recipe collection to honor my grandmother. Finally, today, I just up and baked banana bread. Loosely based on the previously posted Banana Chocolate Bread, today I went chocolate free (no cocoa powder in the house...) and substituted buttermilk for milk (because we lactose intolerants don't tend to keep milk around the house either...). It was a bit of an experiment since I had to adapt the previous recipe's self-rising flour concept, and I didn't know if my bananas were ripe enough, and darned if I couldn't figure out what order to put the ingredients together in, but the timing was perfect and the results a delicious golden brown. This Buttermilk Banana Bread is taste test approved!

Ingredients:

1 and 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour (my go-to flour for healthy baking)
1/4 teaspoon plus 1/8 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon plus 1/8 teaspoon salt
2 small-to-medium bananas
2/3 cup canola oil
2 eggs
1/2 cup white sugar
3 Tablespoons buttermilk (I had 2% on hand)

Directions: 

1.) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a medium bowl, combine the oil, sugar and eggs and beat to thoroughly combine (I just used a fork).

2.) In a separate bowl, sift the flour, baking powder, and salt together. Add 2 Tablespoons of buttermilk and mix again.

3.) In a small bowl, mash your bananas. This is where I added my final 1 Tablespoon of buttermilk so that the bananas would be easier to whisk up. Add the egg mixture to the flour mixture, stirring slowly, then mix in the mashed bananas until the batter comes together (it's okay if it's still a little lumpy. Banana bread should be lumpy!).

4.) Pour batter into a loaf pan greased with nonstick cooking spray and bake approximately 40 minutes (Forty minutes gave it the perfect brown around the edges, crispy on the outside but still moist on the inside. Still, check your oven just to be sure as temperatures may vary). Remove from the oven and let cool at least 10 minutes before removing from pan and transferring to a wire rack to cool completely (though it tastes best warm).

Check out my other baking projects this month!