Perhaps that is why I got a little cocky with the recipe.
Theoretically, you CAN interchange muffin and bread recipes. IF you allow for density in cooking times. Which I did not in this iteration.
;)
So, the preparation began as well as any. I even brought out my immersion blender to get the liquid batter super smooth. Which was nice, truthfully.
Anyway, this is the same recipe as the one my Low-Fat Whole-Wheat Banana Oat Muffins was ORIGINALLY based upon. I wanted this banana bread to be really delicious, rather than just merely slightly delicious and healthy.
So... butter instead of margarine. White flour instead of whole-wheat. No oats. More sugar.
The recipe was sound.
The batter was good.
My blunder?
I forgot to account for batter density in the cooking. I should have made two smaller loaves, rather than one large one.
Ahhh... retrospection...
Anyway, here's what I did RIGHT.
Mix all dry except the sugar (which has so much moisture content, I typically consider it a 'wet' ingredient).
As with my Low-Fat Whole-Wheat Banana Oat Muffins I prepared the "wet" (bananas, sugar, and butter) mixture very similarly.
Mixing the hell out of it with the immersion blender was a nice trick that I'll definitely do again. I was worried about how liquidy the bananas would get, but it turns out that using frozen bananas is good for that as well!
Then, make a well, add wet to dry.
I mixed this with a fork until it was blended well, and then poured it into my bread tin.
Heh heh heh.
So... if you're an experienced baker. SHUT THE F#$& UP!
Heh heh heh. I'm not saying it was one of my better ideas, OK?
So... that is what we say is that.
I'm pretty sure any normal human being over the age of six will figure out what happened next... and if I had not been under the influence of some debilitating and assuredly mitigating pall of whatever... I'm sure I would have as well.
Of course... I knew about 20 minutes in what I had done wrong. When the sides of the "bread" were getting very nicely golden, but the centre was more like a thick cream-of-banana soup... well let's just say there was a figurative head-smack and a couple of colourful expletives.
:)
So... it was too late to pull it out and re-distribute, so I pulled out all the stops in my attempts to fix it. I moved it to the top rack in the oven, and turned down the heat a little. I covered the top with some tin foil. I even 'helped along' the naturally-occurring split in the middle.
Nevertheless, the bread still took about an hour... which was much more than it should have. The middle of the bread was still very under-cooked, but it needed to be removed from the heat before the crust actually burned.
<sigh>
The bread was tasty... in the middle parts between the over-cooked crust, and the under-done bottoms.
We ate several pieces.
I'm still going to chalk this up as a fail, though.
I DO bet, however, that I will never make that mistake again!
:)
