For my birthday this year two of my oldest friends got me such a great foodie gift: a subscription to the monthly spiceboxes from The Spicery. The Spicery sends you all the spices you need to do a curry night in for four people, so you can forget the takeaways! My first month’s box gave me everything I needed to cook up a chicken korma, sag aloo and raisin chutney, all I had to do was go and buy the meat, veg & rice and follow the recipe. I used it to treat The Boyfriend’s family to a slap up meal and it went down a storm!
I will blog a bit more about the curries and the spicebox curry night experience another time though. For this recipe I used the free spice sample The Spicery sent me alongside my korma kit along with a few recipes and ideas for what to use it for. The free sample was a spice blend called Baharat which contains paprika, black pepper, cumin, cassia, cardamon, coriander, cloves and nutmeg. The recipe suggestions that came with it were Spicy Meatballs & Spaghetti and Baharat Banana Bread. I chose to make the banana bread as it was just something totally different to the curries I’ve been using the spices for.
This was such a simple and quick to make recipe and I think it’d be a really good one for making with and for kids. It’d be really easy for them to follow and full of flavours they will enjoy. I have used a food processor to mix this purely because my bananas weren’t that ripe and wouldn’t have been too easy to mash by hand. As long as your bananas are nice and ripe and mushy then this recipe is really easy to do manually and you don’t need any sort of special equipment.
I think this loaf makes a perfect tea time treat, not too sickly sweet and over indulgent but tasty enough to really enjoy with a nice cup of tea. You can buy a pinch of Baharat spice blend from The Spicery for just 69p but if you’d rather stick to your store cupboard, there are plenty of things you could substitute for this. Allspice would make a great alternative, cinnamon and/or nutmeg would give it a really lovely flavour or you could make up your own spice blend of all the flavours you love. You’ll need a generous teaspoon of it for this recipe.
Ingredients
3 ripe bananas
120g melted butter
120g demerara sugar (plus 1-2 tbsp for decoration)
3g Baharat spice blend
220g self raising flour
Method
1. Preheat oven to 180°C. In a food processor mash up your three bananas.
2. Pour in the melted butter and combine.
3. Add the sugar and Baharat. Mix until fully combined.
4. Add the flour and mix until a dough has formed. Pour into a greased loaf tin. Bake in the oven for 30 minutes.
5. Remove from the oven and sprinkle with 1-2 tbsp more demerara sugar.
6. Remove from the oven and leave to cool before removing from the tin.
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