Ingredients:
- 1/3 cup skim milk
- 1 teaspoon lemon juice
- 1 3/4 cups whole wheat flour
- 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 2 large eggs
- 3/4 cup white sugar
- 3 ripe bananas, mashed
- 1 tablespoon canola oil
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Lightly spray a 9x5 inch loaf pan or 16 muffin cups with cooking spray. Stir the skim milk and lemon juice together in a glass measuring cup; let stand until curdled, about 30 minutes. Whisk together the whole wheat flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt; set aside.
- Beat the eggs and sugar together with an electric mixer until smooth. Mix in the mashed bananas, the milk mixture, canola oil, and vanilla extract. Stir in the flour mixture just until all ingredients are moistened. Pour the batter into the prepared pan or muffin cups.
- Bake in the preheated oven until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, about 1 hour for a loaf, or 30 minutes for muffins. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes before removing to cool completely on a wire rack.
Take-Aways:
1) The bread is really dense so I would either add more oil (like another review suggested) or substitute the oil for applesauce (like a different review stated).
2) I didn't cook the loaf for an hour; I set the timer to 50 min at first, then added another 5 min at the end and it was perfectly done.
And I made a point to get some pictures of the end result too.
The standard "here's the food" picture. I have been reading online photography articles (more on those later) and decided to try some of the ideas, such as: use different background/backdrops to see how the bread would show up with different colors by it. Well I don't have a "studio" with backdrops so I looked around my home to see what I could try to use as a different background and came up with...
one of the lids on our coffee table (one side is a wooden tray and the other is this dark brown leather cushion) but I thought it was too dark. (I purposely didn't crop these pics so that the background object could be seen). Because I thought the brown on brown was too dark, I next tried...
Our linen colored bar/island chair, but I decided although I liked the texture of the material it wasn't my favorite. I remembered I saw a photo that had used a basic cutting board as a backdrop for food, so I tried it
and decided I really like the look and contrast of wood by food and will be looking for old cutting boards on any future thrift/antique shopping ventures. All of the above pics were taken in the evening and I always find it so hard to get the lighting right in our kitchen with overhead track lighting, so I decided to wait until the next morning for the next photo attempts because I had read somewhere that natural light is best to photograph in. So in the morning I decided to unwrap the bread again (yep, I waited to try any until I tried to get some better pics) and use only the light streaming thru our windows.
Also, this was the 1st time I took the "leap" and shot in Manual mode! Up until now I had been preferring to shoot either in Aperture (A) or Shutter Priority (S) modes, but, again, I have been reading some articles and my confidence in my skills have grown so I decided to just try it out.
The combo of natural light, Manual mode, and our plain dishes resulted in waaay more pics and me liking waaay more of the pics I took, YEAH!!!
doesn't that bread look yummy?!? Trust me, it was :)
Breakfast is finally served :)
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