I’ve been in a food rut lately, but this little banana bread brought me out of it.
By now I’m sure most of us have baked some kind of banana bread, but have you made a little itty bitty one? I could not resist trying it when I found this recipe. It’s so cute. I included a butter knife in the photos so you can get a sense of the scale of the actual size of it.
To make this mini-treat requires a bit of tiny additional hardware. So you either need to own or buy a 5.5 x 3 inch loaf pan. When my husband bought a couple of these loaf pans for bread baking (adorable style) a few months ago I thought they were the cutest things ever, but that I’d probably never use them. I was wrong.
Anyhoo, if you have a tiny pan and a ripe banana that you’re trying to get rid of, well, make this. Other convenient theories include not wanting to eat an entire regular size loaf of banana bread, or maybe you just want to try something different, or you want a recipe that is fun to do with the kids (and is even kid-sized).
I love this close up shot so that you can see the fun speckles of banana. In the middle of taking pictures I remembered that a banana is the universal item to use for scale. In this case, I had to do that for scale and a sort of unintentional ingredient picture. It made me smile.
Little Banana Bread Recipe
(Makes a 5.5 x 3 inch loaf)
Ingredients:
- 1/2 cup all-purpose flour (equivalent to 2.5 ounces)
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/8 teaspoon salt
- 1/4 cup of ripe banana, peeled and mashed (equivalent to about 1 small banana)
- 1 large egg
- 1 tablespoon butter, melted and cooled
- 1 tablespoon sour cream (or plain yogurt)
- 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Directions:
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 5.5 x 3 inch loaf pan and set it aside. (I lined the pan with parchment paper first in order to get the banana bread out more easily to cut for the photos but that is not necessary.)
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt together. These are the dry ingredients. Set this aside.
- In another medium bowl, whisk together the mashed banana, egg, melted and cooled butter, sour cream, and vanilla extract until the mixture is smooth. These are the wet ingredients.
- Add the wet ingredients into the bowl of dry ingredients and gently mix everything together just until combined. Don’t over mix it. The batter will be lumpy.
- Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan and bake it in the preheated oven for 30 to 40 minutes. Rotate the pan halfway through the baking. (Mine baked for 35 minutes.)
- Let the pan cool on a wire rack for about 5 minutes. Remove the banana bread from the pan and let it cool. It tends to be softer and will fall apart a bit if it’s still warm when you cut it.
Slightly adapted from: America’s Test Kitchen The Complete Cooking for Two Cookbook
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