Banana Bread with Ginger

Today our friend Aaron came over, and he had a big bag of bananas that weren't doing too well and also some ginger to use up (he's the friend who I made zenzerino with, from the previous post-luckily it wasn't the same ginger...), so we decided to make banana bread. I found a recipe and altered it a bit. My sugar-eating companions enjoyed it very much. Here's my version:

Banana Bread with Ginger

1/2 cup butter

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup plain yogurt

3 ripe bananas

2 1/4 cups whole wheat flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp allspice

2 Tbsp fresh ginger, zested

My (lazy) food processor/blender directions: Pulverize banana in food processor. Take out the banana and cream the butter and sugar in the food processor. Add banana, yogurt, and ginger. This will yield a spongier bread, and as you can see below, a fluffy batter.

Normal directions for less lazy people: Cream together butter and sugar. Add yogurt and mashed bananas.

Then: Combine all dry ingredients in a seperate bowl and mix dry and wet ingredients. Bake at 350 for about an hour or until a knife comes out clean.

Then, we made molasses frosting.

Then, Aaron ate a lot of ginger.

Zenzerino, also known as limoncello without the lemons

How can you not smile when a big plate of ginger and orange zest are looking up and smiling at you? You forget just how many times you zested your hands instead of the stringy ginger roots. You haven't yet noticed that your fingernails are a strange yellow color. It hasn't sunk in that you have to wait 80 days to try it, and a meteor (or spy satellite) could fall out the the sky sometime before you get to taste your creation.

I made limoncello last year "to give as gifts for Christmas". We gave away one bottle, I think, and kept the rest. It was a big hit. So, Aaron, who was in the lucky household to recieve the one bottle we gave away, decided to make his own, but this time with ginger. We zested half a pound of ginger and 6 oranges, and at this moment they are sitting in 100 proof vodka in his kitchen, awaiting the next step. We're just following the recipe I used for my limoncello. We still have a while to wait, but for now I will continue to be amused by our smiling ginger-orange friend.