Brown Sugar Cinnamon Swirl Banana Bread

A couple weeks ago, with Caitlin in the middle of her morning sickness and pretty much only able to eat simple and complex carbs, I made this delicious banana bread.  And seeing as it's a good recipe for bringing to a holiday party/family get together and pretty easy to make, I thought I should get off my big non-posting butt and share it with the rest of you.  Luckily Caitlin seems to be past the worst of the sickness and back to eating real foods, so huzzah, I shall hopefully be back to cooking/creating/posting more often in the near future.

Anyway, back to the recipe at hand, here's what you'll need: (This recipe is designed to make 2 loaves of Banana Bread, mainly because at the time, I had 6 Bananas that had been in the cupboard for a little too long and were starting to get brown.  If you want to make 1 loaf, then just halve everything)


Banana Bread:
2 cup granulated sugar
2 Sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
4 large eggs
6 overripe bananas
2 tablespoon milk
2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
4 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoon salt

Cinnamon Streusel:
2/3 Cup Brown Sugar (firmly packed)
1/4 Cup Flour
2 Tsp Cinnamon
1/2 Stick Butter, Hard/Cold

So here goes with the instructions: heat the oven to 325 degrees.  In a mixing bowl, combine the sugar and butter together and mix until light and fluffy.  Add in the eggs one at a time while continuing to beat the mixture.  Stop the mixer and in a separate bowl, mash the bananas with a fork and mix in the milk and cinnamon.  Then in another separate bowl, mix the dry ingredients together: flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

Go back to the mixer and slowly combine the bananas one third at a time and continue mixing until all the bananas are incorporated.  Then begin to add in the dry ingredients from that bowl also 1/3 at a time.  Once all the dry ingredients have been incorporated, stop mixing and remove bowl from mixer.  In a separate bowl, combine the streusel ingredients: brown sugar, flour, cinnamon, and butter.  Using the mixer, blend the streusel ingredients until they are well mixed together and the butter is totally incorporated with the dry ingredients.

Grease bread pans with some Crisco or Baking Pam and split the bread batter evenly between the two pans. Once that is done, split the streusel mix on top of the batter in each bread pan, and then take a knife or spatula and stir/swirl the streusel around in the banana bread batter.  Be careful that you do not stir too much or too vigorously, because you don't want to mix the streusel into the batter, just simply allocate it in a swirl within the batter.

Once they are ready in the pans, place in the oven for 60 to 70 minutes, or until a tooth pick or knife inserted into the loaf comes out dry.  Then remove from the oven, let cool and enjoy.  Slice the loaves into 1/2"-3/4" thick slices and eat plain, toasted and buttered, or get fancy and put some caramel ice cream on top.  Any way you slice it, it's delicious!