You Can Make Anything With...The Basics

These past few days I have been thinking of making a cake, however I held off, mostly because we had so many other goodies to eat first. But, then again I caught myself thinking I needed to dig out my recipes in order to find something to make.

Today I could smell very ripe bananas in the kitchen (that sticky sweet banana smell) and knew something needed to be done with this bunch or I would lose them to compost. Of course, the most obvious choice is to make a banana bread.

So, I started to go and look up my recipes - but then stopped myself. This is simple, making ANY bread, any cake, any dessert can be a basic, simple start with just 3 or 4 ingredients, then we just add on from there to provide different tastes or textures. Right?

I mean, think about it - the basics for any cake or bread are; flour, water or milk, baking soda, salt, and then butter or oil, perhaps something sweet if needed. If we only put 2 cups of spelt flour, bread soda and salt into a mixing bowl - this could be the start of nearly anything!

Bananas in flour

Well, that is just what I did. I took 2 cups of spelt flour, 1 teaspoon of bread soda, some sea salt, 1 cup of goat's yoghurt/milk and a duck egg. This was my basic cake mixture to start off with. I wanted to make a banana bread, so to this I added 3 mashed bananas, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and nutmeg, a little more yogurt and kept stirring.

Then I looked around the kitchen to find something nice to put into the bread. I really like the taste of apricots and walnuts, a handful of these went in as well. By now, it was looking very much like a cake batter, smelled great and had enough flavour packed into it, so I just added a little date syrup to sweeten it.

I then poured this mixture into a loaf pan lined with unbleached parchment paper and put it into the oven at 180 degrees for nearly an hour. And voila! Here we have it....

Banana loaf cooling on rack

It was the nicest banana bread I have ever made and there is hardly a crumb left right now. It was fragrant, light, tasty and very moist. Perfect in every way, I have never had one turn out so well. I think it was because I completely followed my internal 'recipe', the same way I make my spelt bread. 

No measuring, no thinking, just intuitively listen and follow your heart - all the way home. 

Have a lovely day,

April 

Banana bread slices