Last weekend, I decided to make another forray into the world of berry-picking.  Earlier this summer, a new friend named So posted on a Facebook group about whether or not people would want to go to 3-Birds Berry Farm and go picking with her.  I had never been berry-picking, ever before, so of course I volunteered to drive and allow everyone else to have this experience too!  So and I had never met in person but we had some mutual friends so I figured – hey – how bad can it be to go berry-picking with some new friends?

Other friends came along, and we car-pooled to the berry farm, only about 5 minutes from campus and still in Blacksburg, and met up with some other friends. It was a great day!  We got there early enough that all of the berries weren’t picked through and it wasn’t too hot either.

This past weekend it was unusually cool so I decided to go check out the berries again.  On the first go around, I made some cinnamon blueberry muffins – this recipe I am still trying to perfect, and when I do I will post it for sure! But this time around, I wanted to do something just a little bit easier so I  decided to make Cinnamon Banana Blueberry Bread. I had some extra bananas on hand from last weekend’s grocery store trip, and I know that when you bake with bananas you should be sure they are super ripe; and these were.  I think that is so that they are easier to mash. I really hope it turns out! Here’s the recipe that I adapted from several other bread recipes, with photos!

Ingredients

Materials:
Bread pan
Sifter
Spoonula
Fork
Oven (duh :))

Wet Ingredients:
2 ripe bananas
2 cups of sugar
1/2 cup of milk
1 egg
1 teaspoon of pure vanilla extract

Dry Ingredients:
2 cups of flour (The SELF-RISING kind. I MEAN IT.)
2 teaspoons of Saigon cinnamon spice
1 teaspoon of nutmeg

The finish:
2 cups of fresh blueberries

*Side note: if you’re not a big baker, I want to share something with you. Over time, I’ve always watched the Food network and noticed that people will mix the two types (dry or wet) of ingredients together, then combine them. I learned when I made those Cinnamon-Blueberry muffins that you can get clumps of flavor in your batter if you do otherwise…so make sure to keep them separate until they area all incorporated and ready! It’s also very nice to sift all of the dry ingredients together to ensure no clumps in the batter.

Steps

Go ahead and crank dat oven up to 350 and let it preheat while you butter and flour up your pan so that your bread can make a clean escape.  Peel the nanners, toss them into the bowl, then use a fork to make a banana puree in your bowl.

Add the sugar and egg to the banana mush (not very photogenic, this part) and stir it up – a spoonula will do the job just fine. Then add your vanilla and stir it up, little darlin’.

Then, in a separate bowl, place your sifter. Place the flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, into the sifter and sift away! Add the sifted try ingredients into the wet, and continue to stir. It should be nicely incorporated into a thicker batter. Now, take your blueberries and go ahead and place them on top of the batter.

Take great care was to not crush the blueberries (unless, of course, you want blue/purple bread…which is fine!) by folding them into the batter.

Place the batter into the pan, and bake at 350 for about an hour. Keep an eye on it though…(hopefully you used self-rising flour)…and make sure it doesn’t burn, because different ovens are different and I completely made up that time. :)

Notes

FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING THAT IS NOT WASTING INGREDIENTS, be sure to use self-rising flour.  Otherwise, I think this recipe is a keeper BUT as of 9:30 p.m. on Thursday night July 18th, I have plans at 10:15 p.m. and I need to run; but I’ll update the blog later tonight or tomorrow with the result. And if it doesn’t turn out, I plan on making it again very soon so that it DOES turn out!

**Update: It did NOT turn out. Just to show that every cooking adventure isn’t perfect, here’s a pic.

But unfortunately, now it is going to go into the trash and I will eat a Reese’s Smores Bar instead. :) What a horrible alternative right?  I’ll get some more bananas and pick more berries this weekend to have another go at it.  Let me know if you guys try the recipe and, if so, what you thought of it! :)

Happy eating, my friends!