Bethany Bakes: Baking Banana Bread, Mom and Me

It's Sunday and my mom has 10 loaves of banana bread to make for JE's mom.

Don't ask me why 10 but basically it means
• a lot of bananas (more than 80!!!)
• a lot of flour
• a lot of sugar
• a lot of hard work, sweat and washing up!

Mom looked like she could do with some help so I offered my kind assistance.

First, she peeled the bananas and mashed them with a fork. I would have done it for her but ... I HATE BANANAS!

Next, she had to measure out the flour (1.5 cups for each loaf), which she had to sift with 1.5 tsp of soda. She let me sift and I am very good at it now. I made mountains out of flour hills.

Then I helped her to melt the butter. Each loaf needs 4 tbsp of melted butter, so she cut them up into small slices, and put them in a bowl and I filled a bigger bowl with hot water (ow) and put her bowl into that bowl and before you knew it, there was a yellow pool of melted b-u-t-t-e-r! (yum)

Next Mom let me use the Kenwood Chef. Now, you must know something about this Kenwood Chef: it is 20 years old. T-W-E-N-T-Y! That's more than twice my age. That's me x 2 + 2. It was my grandmother's and my mom took it over when my granny passed away :,(

But anywaaaaaay, Mom put the mashed bananas (yuck) in the mixing bowl, added 2 eggs (without shells haha), and 1 cup of sugar. I helped her to mix it all up till the batter was nice and smooth. Next, we added the melted butter, and then the flour. Finally we added

• 2 pinches of salt
• 1 pinch of nutmeg powder
• 1 pinch of cinnamon powder

(that's a lot of pinching)

I mixed it nicely up for Mom, then I brushed the loaf pans with some melted butter.

Meantime Mom pre-heated the oven to 180 deg Celsius (that's like SIX times as hot as a normal day in Singapore).

She poured my batter into the loaf pan, and slid it into the oven.

I watched the banana bread rise. And rise. And rise. It was so hot I thought my face was going to burn!

After 25 minutes Mom stuck a skewer into the centre (fat) part of the loaf. "Done?" she asked me. There was still a bunch of wet goop on the skewer.

"Noooo!" I said, "not yet!"

So we let it bake for another 7 minutes, and finally, the skewer came out clean.

Mom took the loaf out of the oven and it smelt just AMAAAAAZING. Pity I don't like bananas.