Baking Banana Bread Mini-Bundts

[canyonwalker]

Several weeks ago I hunted around to find a fresh copy of a family recipe for banana bread I'd lost track of. Hawk and I were doing a baking exchange with friends here and in our neighborhood. I wanted that recipe I remembered enjoying from my childhood— and making in my own kitchen years ago— because it was so much better than others I tried. Finally I had it, although by then it was almost a week into the new year (the exchange nominally being a holiday exchange). It was time to bake!



In the past I'd always made the batter by starting with the liquid ingredients and sugar in a blender or food processor, and then mixing them by hand into the dry ingredients in a large bowl. The old recipe even said to do it that way. This time we had a sturdy kitchen mixer at our disposal, so I used that instead. Though I still mixed the sugar and wet ingredients first, then gradually added in the flour and other dry ingredients.

For the baking itself we took a different direction than a standard loaf pan.



We'd seen mini Bundt pans at a discount store earlier in the week. A) They were cute, B) they were stackable so they wouldn't take up a lot of room in our well-stocked cabinets, and C) they created nice portion sizes suitable for sharing with friends— and for our own consumption as a family of two. We bought four sets. ...Well, we bought one set. Hawk went back and bought 3 more. Hawk still has her mother's habits of "Cook like a squad of Army soldiers is coming over for dinner." 😅

Filling the cups up just past the nub in the middle is the right amount to allow for rising during baking. The timing I had to figure out as I went because there's no particular recipe for this style of pan. The direction of "45-50 minutes" for a loaf pan is way wrong here.



I don't remember now how long the right time worked out to be. That's one of the drawbacks of writing this 5 weeks later. Important little details like that are lost! Next time I'll just have to do what I did this time: start with an initial guesstimate of, like, 6 minutes, then eyeball them for done-ness, then use a cake tester to make the final decision about when to take them out. Oh, and then eat one from the first batch to fine tune the cooking for the next batch(es). 😋



I made two batches of banana mini-Bundt bread that night. Each batch I divided in half and made half with chocolate chips, half without. Both types were great.

The idea of adding chocolate chips is one I came up with myself years ago. The recipe actually calls for using nuts... but I don't think I've ever made it with nuts. Some people are allergic. And it turns out using something sweet like chocolate chips is way better. That's another reason I like this particular recipe: it's flexible. It's awesome without the nuts. It's awesome-r with chocolate chips instead of nuts.

Comments

[stinaleigh]

I haven't seen mini Bundt pans individually like that. I have 2 six-well pans that are like muffin pans, but Bundt.

[canyonwalker]

We got the individual pans at TJ Maxx/Homegoods. I cruised the cookware aisle looking for a pan for making deep dish pizza when I spotted these. Mini Bundt seemed like a fun variation on cupcakes for baking individually sized treats. $5 or 6 for a set of 4 seemed like a reasonable price. And the stacking design meant they wouldn't take much space in our nearly full cabinets. Hawk agreed, so we bought a set of 4. Then she went back and bought 3 more sets because, like I said, her family recipes are all calibrated for "Feeds: 8-10 soldiers".

[culfinriel]

Those mini bundts are something I haven't tried, but they clearly make great individual cakes.