Next up whilst I’m away from my bloggin duties, we have the very lovely Chantelle from Mama Mummy Mum who blogs all about life with her 4 gorgeous girlies and husband. Chantelle has been blogging almost as long as me but is infinitely better at it! With 4 beautiful girls (all unique in their little ways) she somehow keeps her sanity and keeps an outnumbered daddy happy - a very mean feat! Well she’s copped onto the fact that I’m Mrs ‘can’t-cook-won’t-cook’ and is guest blogging about baking banana bread with her babies. I’ll admit to a healthy dose of mummy envy as she looks so bloody fabulous and I feel like a whale right now - how does she do it making such yummy looking goodness!?

If you’ve read my blog before, you may have seen a few baking posts. I don’t make anything amazing but it is an activity that I like to do time and time again with my daughters and the bonus is, you get something scrummy to eat at the end of it, well most of the time, we have had the odd disaster.

Now I often call my children monkeys because of the little things they get up to when at home, they may have others fooled but believe me, these children are no angels.

So what do you feed monkeys? Well the first thing that springs to mind is bananas. I’ve never baked anything that included bananas as ingredient before so I had to do a little of research to find the perfect recipe.

The girls and I finally decided to make banana bread, not only will this make a delicious snack, it would be perfect to put in a packed lunch, the added banana is 1 of their 5 a day surely.?!

Ingredients

285g plain flour

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

½ tsp salt

110g butter, plus extra for greasing

225g caster sugar

2 eggs

4 ripe bananas, mashed

85ml buttermilk (or normal milk mixed with 1½ tsp lemon juice or vinegar)

1 tsp vanilla extract

half a packet of chocolate chips

Preparation

* Switch your oven on to 180 degrees or gas mark 4 and let it warm up.

* Sift the flour, bicarbonate of soda and the salt into a bowl, not over the table as my children like to do.

* Mash up the bananas, the girls struggled slightly with this, adult help comes in handy at this point.

* Cream the butter and sugar together until soft.

* Add the eggs, milk, bananas and vanilla extract to the sugar and butter, mixing together well.

* Fold in the dry ingredients, I find doing this slowly makes it easier and the girls found it simpler using a wooden spoon.

*Finally add in the chocolate chips ( you don’t have to put these in, we Hazelden’s have a sweet tooth!!)

* Grease a loaf tin and pour the mixture inside, Freya wanted to do it one spoonful as a time but we convinced her that might take a while so we just picked up the bowl and tipped it in.

* Place in the oven for between 30 and 60 minutes, keep checking until it is a lovely golden brown colour.

* Once baked to perfection, remove from the oven and place on a wire rack to cool.

As you can see from the photos, Nannie ended up being roped in to help whilst I became the photographer. I was so pleased by the end result. Not only did the bread rise, yay, it tasted delicious, lovely crust on the outside, whilst remaining moist on the inside. One loaf can be cut into about 15 slices depending on the thickness, although as always it didn’t take long for those monkeys to gobble it all up.

We’ve decided to add in some dried fruit next time instead of the chocolate chips, what ingredients would you put in yours?? xx

To find out more about Chantelle and her family beyond her blog, you can connect with her on the following social media accounts:

Twitter – @MamaMummyMum

Facebook - Mama Mummy Mum

Pinterest – Mama Mummy Mum

Instagram – MummyHazelden