For the last few years, I’ve developed a habit of baking when I’m stressed. For a girl who only did one year of Home Ec in school, I seem to have developed an affinity with it for taking the blues away – as my college house mates will attest to. Generally it wouldn’t be much variation from buns and brownies, unless it was one of those “Add an egg to the packet” things – but there would be a gorgeous smell radiating through the house and a table full of goodies at the end of it, ready to be distributed to whoever would take it – while I was a stress baker, I wasn’t much of a stress eater. Much. I knew that demolishing the cakes was a bad idea.
Since starting Weight Watchers over the Summer, I’ve not baked. Most of my baking was sweet stuff, things I tended to realise didn’t really align properly with a diet where I was attempting to lose all of the baby weight and more. Until this week. This week, I discovered the pure joy that is banana bread – and even better, guilt free banana bread because whatever way the ingredients combine, I don’t have to point it on the Filling and Healthy plan. I got the recipe from a Facebook group that I’m part of, with slight variation, and made it the other night – not out of any particular stress, but it did make me feel a lot better afterwards.
Each day in work for lunch I was able to have some for “dessert” or as a snack at my 3pm tea break – which felt fantastic because it felt like a proper treat, but guilt free, unlike the chocolate bars glaring at me from the canteen singing “Eat me!” at me when I walked past. It has been a rough few weeks diet wise, especially returning to work. So bringing my treat to work with me definitely helped.
The Recipe – if you’re on Weight Watchers and pointing, its 5 points a slice, but if you’re on Filling and Healthy like me, its FREE. Slices of pure, free, joy.
Prep time: 10 min Cook time: 50 min Other time: 0 min Serves: 10
Ingredients
150g all-purpose flour
60g unpacked brown sugar
1/2 tsp table salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
3 tsp sunflower oil
3 Large Eggs
3 large banana(s), ripe
60g uncooked old fashioned oats
Preheat oven to 180 degrees. In a large bowl, stir together dry ingredients. Try not to get flour everywhere. Add oil and eggs; mix thoroughly.
In a smaller bowl, mash bananas with a potato masher or fork. Add bananas and oatmeal to batter. Stir like mad.
Spray a loaf pan with cooking spray. Pour batter into pan and bake until top of loaf is firm to touch, 45 to 55 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool in pan for 5 minutes. Flip out and cool on a wire rack for another 10 minutes.
And voila – banana bread. I’m ashamed its taken me this long to learn how to make it because it was so simple.
This morning I made two variations – a loaf of banana bread with tiny pieces of apple, raisins and cinnamon in it (yum! and also free!) and filled bun cases with banana bread with chocolate chips (not free, but roughly about a point each due to the 50g of chocolate chips spread between all of them.) They’ve gone down a treat in this house and will be fab for throwing into the lunchbox during the week.
I’m now on the look out for further healthy recipes – there will most definitely be more of the soup made for work lunches, and sooner or later I will start the batch cooking – any suggestions?