A Wedding Anniversary and Banana Bread Recipe

 

You'll find the Banana Bread recipe at the end of this post. But first I want to share my wedding anniversary with you.

Despite being married for 32 years today is my eighth wedding anniversary. That'll happen if you choose 29th February as your wedding date. Which we did. You see we had been living together for seven years  so we needed a wedding date that stood out.

This was our first new years eve together. Three weeks earlier our eyes had met across a crowded room.  It was maybe a week later we were introduced by a mutual aquaintance. It was love at first sight.  Almost immediately we moved in together and have been together ever since.

Because I knew I'd be going through chemo when our anniversary day came around we celebrated back in November. We spent a couple of days at one of the Spicers retreats. This time Spicers Clovelly Estate in Montville, the one with the fabulous Long Apron restaurant.

The gardens were full of sculptures.

Relaxing places to sit and relax.

Inside in the library......

...and outside in the garden.

Breakfast was served on the patio in the sun.

Unfortunately it was too dark in the restaurant to take any photos of our degustation dinner.

Finally, that banana bread recipe.  I've been reading the blog Recipe Rifle for a little while now. Which is where I came across this recipe.  It is from the Leon 2 cookbook. I've adapted it slightly by replacing the pecans with walnuts (which I didn't bother roasting first). I didn't have any spelt flour so used plain flour instead.

Banana bread (adapted slightly from the Leon 2 cookbook)

50g walnust nuts
150 veg oil
200g dark brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
350g ripe skinned bananas (about 3 bananas)
75g natural yoghurt
1 tsp bicarb of soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
225g plain flour
1 extra banana, peeled
2 tbs caster sugar

• 1 Pre-heat your oven to 170C and butter a 2lb loaf tin and line it with baking paper.
• In a bowl whisk together the oil, sugar, vanilla and eggs.
• In another bowl, roughly mash the bananas.  Add the youghurt and mix together. Sprinkle over the bicarb of soda, baking powder, cinnamon and salt and stir again.
• Mix the banana mixture and the sugar/egg mixture together. Chop the walnuts toss those in too. Then sprinkle over the flour and stir until things are only just combined. Do not overmix. Spoon the batter into your  lined tin. 
• Slice your spare banana down the middle and place one half on top of the batter, then sprinkle over the caster sugar. The banana half will sink into the mixture during cooking.
•  Bake for 45-50 mins.

 

I apologise for the layout of this post. I seem to have a bug stopping me from creating paragraphs.