To understand this recipe, you have to know one thing about me: I eat cheddar cheese on top of my banana bread. Yes, I know I’m weird. Chris has told me so several times. My mom has conveniently forgotten that this is the way we ate it the entire time I was growing up. I know this because one of the times that Chris told me I was weird, I tried to get her to back me up about it being the way we always did it, and she denied it. That was how we ate our Swedish raisin rye bread, but our banana bread? No cheese ever touched it, if you ask her now.

Whatever. I know the truth. And even if the meeting of toasted banana bread and melted cheddar is a figment of my imagination, I’m glad to have it in my cheese-addled mind.

Yesterday, there were two overripe bananas staring at me from their place in the fruit bowl, and I was hungry, so I decided to make banana bread. I opened to the page in my breakfast recipes binder that lists both my mom’s recipe and my healthy variation on it (think applesauce replacing oil, whole wheat flour, added oat bran, etc.). I knew I wanted to make both of them at some point in the near future to test the recipes and take some photos, but I was ambivalent as to which one I wanted to do right then.

One of the directions I wrote in both recipes mentions the cheddar cheese thing (the direct quote is “best toasted with melted butter and cheese. mmmmm.”), and I started thinking about my eccentric preference, and how if it was wrong, I didn’t want to be anywhere near right. And then inspiration struck. If I put the cheese in the banana bread, everyone who ate the bread would have to try it with the cheese! And I could save myself work when it came to eating it myself. All I’d have to do is toast the bread and slather a bit of Irish butter on it. Of course, I could even put butter in the bread!

Here is the recipe for my fiendish master plan. Though, I would like to note that I don’t think the cheese thing is really all that weird. We pair many fruits and cheese together, and the sharpness of the cheddar really does set off the sweetness of the banana bread. The very best part of every slice, though, is the crunchy top crust formed by the sugar and cinnamon I sprinkle on right before sending the loaf into the oven. I still have the childish temptation to eat only the top half of every slice.

And as less-healthy as I’m saying this is, I did use whole wheat flour rather than white. I let myself eat a lot more dairy fat than white flour, so this really isn’t so far out of my usual eating philosophy.

Cheddar Banana Bread

(printable version)
A richer variation of my mother’s non-cheddarific recipe.
Yield: 1 loaf

Ingredients
Wet
3 bananas, mashed
2 oz. (4 tablespoons) butter, melted
2 eggs, well beaten

Dry
1 3/4 cups flour (I used King Arthur Flour’s White Whole Wheat, but all purpose would work as well.)
3/4 tsp soda
1/2 tsp salt
2/3 cup sugar

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
Cinnamon and sugar for dusting the top

Procedure

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spray loaf pan with oil.
2. In a medium mixing bowl, combine the wet ingredients. Add the dry ingredients and stir to combine again. Add the cheddar cheese and stir one more time.
3. Scrape the batter into a loaf pan. Smother with a good dusting of sugar and cinnamon, and put the pan in the oven.
4. Bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the loaf comes out clean. Allow to cool in the pan for 15 minutes, then remove from the pan and allow to cool until sturdy enough to cut or cool enough to wrap up and store.

Notes

• Next time I make this, I plan to try adding a cup and a half of cheese in search of the perfect cheese-to-banana balance.
• I only had two bananas this time, so I added a third of a cup of applesauce so that the batter was loose enough to stir.

Needless to say, the bread came out wonderfully. It was almost like a scone (once I slathered it with a generous helping of Irish butter), with a wonderful nutty flavor. It was certainly one of the better 100% whole wheat breads I’ve eaten in awhile, and I expect to be acquiring more of this great flour soon so I can make more.

Note to King Arthur Flour (since I know at least someone from your company reads this blog): The instructions said to “cut a deep cross in the top of the loaf” (before baking). To me, that meant that I made a nice round ball and cut a cross about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way through it, expecting that it would expand and close up like a yeasted loaf might. However, the end result was a loaf with four separate pyramid-like peaks. Granted, I think that it looked really cool, but it made for poorly shaped slices.

I made a few mistakes along the way. Mistakes like forgetting the egg in the citrus pate sucree (I put it to the left of the food processor and the rest of my mise en place to the right) and experimenting with a store-bought carton of egg whites for the meringue when I didn’t have time to make a second batch. However, even without that egg, the pate sucree was possibly the best tart crust I’ve ever made, and several people complimented it. It uses both lemon and orange zest, a flavor combination that I used in my wedding cake years ago that really seemed to punch up the flavor.

But there was no blessing in disguise in regards to the meringue, unless I count the reminder that things never go well when I try to cut corners. At least this time it was in the spirit of experimentation and not just out of laziness, as usual. I used the Trader Joe’s 100% egg whites, and I knew that they weren’t going to be ideal when I saw how cloudy they were, but I went ahead and made the meringue. The foam ended up looking, well, very insipid and watery, not the airy dollop of heaven that I wanted to recreate from the magazine. By the time I was done, there was no time left, so the mediocre meringue went on the tart and I did my best to torch it, even though it didn’t want to brown properly.

Despite all of that, I don’t think I’ve ever had a dessert disappear so quickly at a big family event or gotten quite so many compliments and questions. I kept being surprised that people liked it, because I wasn’t entirely pleased with the mouth feel of the cranberry filling, as pretty as it was. It had that gross texture that comes from too much cornstarch, so next time I make this I’ll either decrease the cornstarch or experiment with some of the alternate thickners my husband has been playing with in his attempts at molecular gastronomy, now that we have a kitchen that we can actually cook in again. The xanthan gum marshmallows he made last week were a huge success, so I’m reading up on hydrocolloides now, too.

As I said above, I picked out a number of new holiday recipes to try this year. When I ate meat, Thanksgiving was one of my favorite holidays, and I’ve been trying to recreate that experience in a vegetarian way for eight years now, with varying amounts of success. This year, though, inspired by the new kitchen, I decided to try to find some new flavors to turn into new traditions, rather than continue to try to recreate the omnivore’s version of the holiday. Pretty much all of them (other than a new twist on the savory seitan and mushroom dish I’ve come up with to stand in for turkey) came from Martha Stewart–I rarely turn to her during the rest of the year, but the recipes in the holiday issues of the magazine are always really appealing to me, so much so that I keep them in their own binder on my cookbook shelf.

Cauliflower Gratin with Endive was delicious–cheesy without being greasy at all, and the Israeli couscous scattered in the bottom of the pan absorbed the sauce but held its shape in a texturally interesting way.

Stuffing was always my favorite part of Thanksgiving, so it took a lot strength to turn my back on the plain old crouton, celery and sage type stuff we always had. The Cornbread, Wild Mushroom and Pecan Stuffing I settled on was so good I just wanted to hold it on my tongue and not swallow it, or even chew it.

We used maitake, hedgehog and oyster mushrooms–I’d never cooked with hedgehog mushrooms, and they were extremely tasty!–so it wasn’t inexpensive. Otherwise, I would’ve made another pan straight away and wolfed it down at home. I have plans to try it with less expensive mushrooms soon. The pecans were a revelation. I’ve often put walnuts into savory cooking, but I think this was my first time using pecans that way, and they complemented the mushrooms very well.

It seems like we made another new dish, but I can’t think of what it was, other than the seitan stuff, where the newness of it lay mostly in my husband’s interpretation of how to cook it based on my instructions I yelled from the shower. That and he tried a trick for quickly browning onions by adding baking soda to them that he read about somewhere online. It worked. But it also made the onions completely dissolve…which had the effect of coating the seitan in the onion pulp and frying it onto it. Not what we were going for, but I think I’ll do it again next time we make it.