Grandma Thelma's "Hawaii Style" Banana Bread

I'm definitely one of those people who breaks up the banana bunch at the store. I've always done this. I don't need like 9 bananas. I'm only one person. I need like...2 bananas. I never thought twice about it until I saw a friend post a status bemoaning banana bunch breakers, and now I'm self conscious about it. I always look for a small bunch to begin with, but sometimes the smaller bunches are too ripe, and I am very strategic about the greenness of my bananas. Anyways, the last time I bought bananas, I thought, oh what the hell, I'll just buy a whole bunch and make sure to eat them all. Yeah, that didn't happen. So I had 3 leftover bananas getting browner and browner. When you can smell the bananas from 10 feet away, it's time to make banana bread.

This is my grandmother's recipe. She's from Hawaii. She met my (Dutch Minnesota farm boy) grandpa when they were both in the Marine Corps and he saw her hula dancing on TV. I know, it's adorable. She's actually not ethnically Hawaiian, but 100% Portuguese, which is a pretty significant ethnic minority on the islands. I think her father owned a sugar cane plantation or a pineapple farm or something. I'm really not joking.

So, my mother, and, thus, my sister and I, grew up eating a lot of Hawaii style food, which, if you had to describe it, is basically various kinds of Asian combined with Portuguese and randomly thrown-in American influences. But island food is island food, a cuisine all its own. I'd really love to open a real Hawaiian restaurant, or a Mediterrasian restaurant, to reflect the complex food influences on the Islands. Nothing pisses my grandmother off more than when places throw some pineapple on something and call it "Hawaiian." Kind of like how people like to put avocado on things and call it "Californian."

So, this is my grandma's Hawaii style banana bread. I haven't tried Courtney's famously amazing banana bread, but I don't think this will be stepping on any toes, since it's a little different. Okay, so it's basically banana bread with coconut in it, but it's delicious.


Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
2 eggs
1 cup mashed banana
3 Tbsp cream
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 3/4 cups flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup nuts (optional, but definitely worth adding - buy the walnut baking pieces from Trader Joe's)
1 cup shredded coconut (sweetened)


1. Preheat oven to 350 F.
2. Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs and mix in.
3. Stir in mashed banana, vanilla, and cream.
4. Combine flour, baking powder, and baking soda, then add to banana mixture.
5. Add nuts and coconut and stir to combine.
6. Pour into a loaf pan. (This makes more batter than is necessary for a standard loaf, but I don't want to mess with the baking alchemy, so I usually just use the leftover batter to make muffins.)
7. Bake loaf for about 50 minutes.



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Tasty!


MEDIA PAIRING:

You knew it was coming. Raffi!