Tate & Lyle Sugar - Banana Bread

Banana Bread

Ingredients
145g caster sugar
1 egg
100g mashed banana
140g flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
70g melted butter

Recipe
1. Preheat oven to 170˚C
2. Beat sugar and eggs together
3. Mix in the mashed banana
4. Mix in the dry ingredients, then stir in the butter.
5. Bake in the oven for 45 minutes.

Thanks to Tate & Lyle for the fairtrade sugar used in this recipe. There's lots of recipe ideas for each type of sugar on their website

Basic White Rustic Loaf

I love it in restaurants when they give you a basket of different breads along with some butter and oil for nibbling before your meal so I decided to make some bread when my family came for dinner one night.

This was a great simple recipe I found on channel 4 from delicious magazine.

I split the dough into 3 and made a loaf with sundried tomatoes in the middle, a loaf with black olives in the middle and a plain one. The baking time was half what the recipe below states because of this split.



Basic White Rustic Loaf
Source: channel 4 from delicious magazine.
Makes about a 750g loaf/12 slices

Ingredients
500g strong white bread flour, plus extra for dusting
1 tsp fine salt
7g sachet fast-action dried yeast
300 ml warm water
1 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for greasing

Recipe
1. Mix together the flour, salt and yeast in a bowl. Create a well in the centre and slowly mix in the water and the oil until the dough comes together – if the dough is very dry, add a little more water.
2. Knead the dough for 5 minutes, until smooth, on a lightly floured surface.
3. Shape like a rugby ball and put onto an oiled, large baking sheet. Leave to rise in a warm place for 40 minutes or until doubled in size.
4. Preheat oven to 220°C. Make slashes with a sharp knife in the top of the dough and dust with flour. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until risen, golden and cooked. Cool on a wire rack and slice to serve.

Taste and Create: Naan

I love Taste and Create, I've said it before and I'll say it again. It's just fantastic! The idea is you sign up for a month and get paired with another blog then you recreate one of the recipes on that blog and they do one from yours! Simple and so much fun.

This month I was paired with Pavani from Cook's Hideout who has a great blog with recipes full of healthy fruit and veg. If you're a regular reader of my blog you'll know that hubby has "issues" with things that sprout from the ground so it was tricky deciding what to do until I found a recipe for naan bread something that I have been wanting to try make for a loooooooong time! How could I resist?



Indian Naan Bread
Sourced from Cooks Hideout
Makes 6

Ingredients
4 cups plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 x 7g active dry-yeast packets
1 tsp sugar
2/3 cup milk, lukewarm
2 tbsp oil
2/3 cup plain yogurt
1 egg, beaten (optional)

Recipe
1. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a mixing bowl. Stir in the yeast and sugar. Make a well in the center. Pour in the milk, oil, yogurt and beaten egg (if using). Beat well, gradually incorporating the surrounding flour to make a dough.
2. Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface for 10 minutes. Place in a lightly oiled bowl, cover with oiled plastic wrap and set in a warm place for about 1 hour, until doubled in bulk.
3. Put a pizza stone on the lowest rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 475°F.
4. Knead the dough lightly again and divide into six pieces. Roll each piece into a tear-drop shape, brush lightly with oil and slap onto the hot pizza stone.
5. Bake the naan for 3 minutes, until puffed up, flip and bake for another 3 minutes.

Irish Tea Loaf

I absolutely love the world of food blogging. There's such a great community to be found with it, each spurring others on to try new and exciting things. Ning over at Heart and Hearth tagged me recently for Breadline Africa after making some moist pumpkin quick bread for the event herself.

With our support, Breadline Africa can convert shipping containers into locations for food production and distribution to the poor people in South Africa. These sustainable community kitchens will not only provide foods such as bread and soup to those in need, but also opportunities for skills development within these poor communities. So, they are not only aiming to give them bread, but also to teach them skills so that they will be able to earn their own bread as well.

Breadline Africa launched the Worldwide Blogger Baker Bake-Off Challenge aiming at raising $ 1 M in funds. This bake-off gives us baking bloggers the power to make a difference in this world. What do we do? Bake bread. Give Dough. Feed Africa. Vals says, "You can sign up for the campaign, make a donation, upload your bread recipes and document your culinary adventures in the media center to spread the word. You don't have to donate money but simply just mention the campaign and create awareness."

The rules for bloggers are outlined below:
1. If you are tagged, copy and paste the rules into your post.
2. Bake bread, do something you wouldn’t normally do, and blog about it. Upload your picture and recipe.
3. Give dough, donate to Breadline Africa and help us end poverty.
4. Tag five bloggers, and ping us so we know you’ve done so.

It turned out that when Ning tagged me for all this that I had been craving some fruit loaf but resisting to buy any. Then at J's funeral there was fruit loaf and then a few days later in planning for a Christmas Eve service for church fruit loaf was mentioned again. I had a look at my online bookmarked recipes and there was a link for Delia's Irish Tea Bread which I just happened to have bought all the ingredients for in preparation for making Christmas cake and decided that I really was destined to make some fruit loaf.



Delia says on her site, "It's always hard for me to believe that this simple little fruit loaf can taste so good. When we were testing recipes, this one disappeared the fastest – none of us could resist just one more little bit. It's good all by itself or spread with butter, and it's quite brilliant toasted." and I have to agree 100%. This bread was so simple to prepare and utterly delicious, I couldn't resist a slice shortly after I took it out of the oven and it was divine. I'll definitely be making this one again. In fact I may make the 2 that Delia makes in the original recipe and freeze one like she suggests! This time I only made the one, so here's Delia's recipe halved and only very slightly adapted.

Irish Tea Loaf
This recipe is taken from How to Cook Book One and Delia's Vegetarian Collection.
Makes 1 small loaf

Ingredients
4 oz raisins
4 oz currants
4 oz sultanas
2 oz whole candied peel, cut into ¼ inch (5 mm) pieces
4 oz demerara sugar
5 fl oz (275 ml) Lapsang Souchong, Earl Grey or any other hot tea
2 oz (110 g) pecan nuts
1 medium egg at room temperature, lightly beaten with 1 tbsp milk
1 cup glacé cherries (my addition to the recipe
1/2 lb self-raising flour


Recipe
1. Line a loaf tin with parchment paper.
2. Place all the fruits, including the candied peel, in a bowl, then dissolve the sugar in the hot tea, pour this over the fruits, cover the bowl and leave it overnight so the fruits become plump and juicy.
3. The next day, pre-heat the oven to 170°C
4. Add the beaten egg mixture to the bowl containing the fruits and add the cherries. 5. Sift in the flour, and mix well.
6. Pour the mixture into the prepared loaf tin and bake in the centre of the oven for 1¼-1½ hours, until they feel springy in the centre.
7. Loosen it straight away with a palette knife and turn out on to a wire rack to cool.


So now to tag 5 people....
1. English Mum
2. Lynn
3. Dell
4. Mr Orph
5. Tina


I've also been tagged for various awards recently too, which have really meant a lot to me and encouraged me, but I've lost track of who all has awarded me things since I got my new computer so sorry to any I haven't blogged about. However, Dell awarded me The Butterfly Award & The Perfect Blend Of Friendship Award. Thank you Dell!!!

Strawberry Banana Bread/Muffins

There was a fab food event last month called the Banana Bread Bakeoff hosted by Not Quite Nigella that I ran out of time to join in with, however Pixie over at You say Tomato, I say Tomato made a beautiful banana bread with strawberries for it. She had explained in the post that she thought it was rather dry and needed some butter spread on a slice for eating, but I was still keen to give this a go. I decided to add an extra banana and a 2 extra strawberries to the mix and left out the walnuts, then using the little scoop I bought for the Daring Baker Cheesecake Pop challenge I placed 2 scoops of the batter into muffin cases and made yummy muffins out of this. They only needed about 35 minutes baking instead of the hour for the loaf and they turned out beautifully full of flavour, and were in no way dry for me!!!!






I've used this as my entry for my Bookmarked Recipes food blog event for this week.








Strawberry & Banana Bread

Ingredients
200g self-raising flour
Pinch of salt
1/4 tbsp bicarbonate of soda
75g unsalted butter
100g light brown sugar
1 beaten egg
75g milk chocolate, finely chopped
6 cut up strawberries
3 ripe bananas, mashed
1 tbsp Golden syrup


Recipe
1. Preheat oven to 180˚C, and separate out muffin cases on a baking tray.
2. Sift the flour, salt and soda together into a bowl.
3. Add all the other ingredients, except the golden syrup, and beat well together. If the mixture is too dry add a couple of Tbsp of milk.
4. Spoon into the muffin cases until about 3/4 filled. Bake in the center of the oven for about 30-35 minutes or until firm in the middle.
5. Brush the top of the loaf with the golden syrup while it's still warm, to give it a lovely glaze.


Thanks for this Pixie!!!!