Bananas past their best!

We arrived home from a great weekend away, walked into the kitchen and were greeted with the smell of over-ripe bananas. Mr Beard immediately grabbed them and said "These are going in the bin". "Oh no," I replied "it's half term, I'll make a banana loaf tomorrow."
So I looked in the beautiful new book I bought with my Christmas book tokens - Homemade Memories by Kate Doran. I found a recipe for chocolate freckled banana loaf. I didn't really fancy chocolate in it, but reading the blurb at the beginning of the recipe it suggested adding walnuts too, so I decided to just do that and omit the chocolate.

The next morning, I went shopping at a budget supermarket. They didn't have wholemeal flour, so I decided as I had frozen peas in the trolley already that I couldn't go elsewhere, white flour would have to do. When I got home I realised that I didn't have brown sugar or Greek yoghurt either!! So I just used caster sugar and 3 tablespoons of the plain yoghurt out of a Muller corner yoghurt! Thinking about it, a recipe using up left over bananas shouldn't really involve buying a lot of other ingredients, so other things got used up too.
The whole thing turned out to be delicious, although I can't really say I used the recipe, other than the measurements and method!

Winnie the Pooh teabread

There are recipes that I go back to again and again, and this is one of those. The title of the cookery book gives this away. A recipe for Pooh's Raisin Bread for eating with honey, from Pooh's Fireside Recipes by Katie Stewart, a book I bought with my pocket money in the 1980s, one of the first cookery books I bought myself. My mum loves this recipe almost as much as me, and often makes it when we meet up. It's a cosy sort of cake, slices spread with butter which go fantastically with a cup of tea. I think the secret of it's deliciousness is how you make the batter and it looks done, and at the last minute you pour in 2 oz of melted butter and mix it in. Yum! This is not one where you can change the recipe or mess with in any way, it's too delicious as it is!