Bread of the Week — Bananarama

This is something I wrote for a friend’s ill-fated music blog Freshly Baked Bread awhile back… the site never took hold, so I never continued with my efforts to make more breads. Oh well…

DISCLAIMER: This is not about music. Not really anyway. This might seem like the wrong outlet for a column about bread. But for the sake of occasional variety and for having a site with a need for some sort of content, perhaps it is perfect synchronicity.

With that in mind, I will make it easy with the transition for those who cannot quit cold turkey.

So what is Bread of the Week? It’s a pretty simple concept: every week (or as often as time will allow) I intend to discover and share a new bread recipe. I will then on many cases (probably not every week, but hopefully often) attempt to bake, eat and review such bread. And because this is mostly a music blog, I will attempt to find an artist that best represents my efforts to serve as listening recommendations while elbow deep in flour.

So without further ado, WEEK ONE! This week, I thought I’d go simple and make Banana Bread. Nothing fancy here but seems pretty delicious as the weather grows colder.

Ingredients:

The ingredients here are fairly straightforward and will no doubt become household items (if they aren’t already) the more and more baking is done.

Directions:

Preheat your oven to 375Â°. Break egg into mixing bowl. Do not add the shell. In fact, throw it in the trash not the sink because it can mess up your garbage disposal unit. Beat egg slightly. Add sugar, melted butter, and vanilla. Blend bananas and add to egg mixture. Sift together flour, soda, and salt and add to mixture.

Add nuts. I chose not to use nuts because I am not too keen on pecans and am allergic go walnuts. Use at your own discretion here…I don’t want any senseless lawsuits because you didn’t realize you had nut allergies.

Grease up a loaf pan with some sort of shortening or buttery substance for no stick purposes. Bake at 375Â° in greased loaf pan (4 1/2″ x 9″ x 5″) for 45 minutes or until inserted wooded toothpick comes out clean. Cool and remove from pan.

Slice bread when cooled at desired thickness. Add butter to slice. Put slice in mouth, and chew until bites are small enough in mouth. Then swallow. Enjoy. This makes roughly six to eight servings so choose your favourite six to eight friends wisely for maximum enjoyment.

After some initial joking and second guessing, I ended up downloading a few songs by, you guessed it, Bananarama. Bit of an obvious choice but I thought it would be a good excuse to see what all the hype was about years back.

Turns out this British girl group had other songs beyond the 8th grade dance party staple, “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye).” Good thing I am not making pastries because this music is already cavity inducing enough as it is.

Come back next week when we explore the depths of another bread.

Mike is an amateur bread maker, having never baked before in his life. He also writes on music at npr.org and hellocomein.com.