Good things are better in small packages.

Who doesn't like mini things? Mini muffins, mini eclairs, mini sandwiches. Bite size stuff is good. Bread is good, mini loaves baked in mini loaf tins are even better. And with that in mind, I'd like to introduce you to my mini loaf tin. I bought it in Lidl (in fact I bought two of them) and I love it! These tins are so useful for all sorts of stuff. Great for little brioche loaves, little soft white bread rolls for serving with soup, and tiny lemon drizzle cakes. Anything you can do in a big tin, you can do in a little tin, and it will look cute and make you feel less greedy when you eat it. You can also freeze little things and defrost just one whenever you fancy it.



Today I needed to make something that was very quick and easy, required little to no effort, and felt like a treat. So I dug out Nigella Kitchen. Now I'm not as big a fan of this book as I am of her earlier efforts (How to be a Domestic Goddess is one of my absolute favourites), but this particular recipe alone was worth buying the book for. Nigella's recipe is for coconut and cherry banana bread, but I never have any dried sour cherries so I make it with dried cranberries instead, and I always make mini loaves.


Ingredients:

125g unsalted butter, softened (with apologies to my snobbier self, I used the cheap supermarket own brand margarine I hate so much, because I'd run out of butter, and the loaves tasted none the worse for it)
About 500g bananas (weighed with skin on) - a bit over or under is fine
150g caster sugar
2 eggs
175g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
100g dried cherries (or cranberries, or sultanas work well too)
100g dessicated coconut

Grease and base line a 2lb loaf tin, or grease and flour six mini loaf tins, and preheat the oven to 170ºC.

Melt the butter (or horrible margarine) and leave to cool. Mash the bananas in a separate bowl.

Beat the sugar into the melted butter, followed by the eggs and mashed bananas. Then fold in the flour, bicarb, baking powder, cherries and coconut. Pour the mixture into the loaf tin(s).

Bake for about 30 minutes for mini loaves and 50 minutes for one normal-sized loaf. A skewer will come out clean when it's done. Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes before turning out onto a wire rack.



Enjoy slightly warm with a cup of coffee and a scraping of butter.

I would like to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who's visited my blog and left comments, I really appreciate them. I'm still really under the weather (in fact I think I'm suffering from bronchitis and am going to see the doctor next week) and have been spending most of my time either at work or in bed so I'm still getting around to visiting all of your lovely blogs, and looking at all the other entries for We Should Cocoa and Random Recipes, so please bear with me and don't think I've been ignoring you!