Friday, June 5, 2009

banana bread sweetened with splenda

Having a few too many bananas lying around meant another round banana bread. This time I decided to use Splenda, taking into account my Pops blood sugar levels. I pumped it full of bananas to keep it moist, and it turned out pretty damn tasty. Heck, at least he'll get some fruit!

Chris's Splenda inspired Banana Bread
5 ripe bananas
1/3 cup unsalted butter (melted and cooled slightly)
3/4 cup Splenda
1 beaten egg
1 teaspoon vanilla (or more, it's delicious)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour
A smidgen of salt

Preheat your cooking box to 350. Mix the butter and bananas together, before adding the Splenda, egg and vanilla. Combine the flour, salt, and baking soda together before adding to the bowl. Mix briefly just until no flour specks are left and pour into a 8 x 4 sprayed loaf pan. Bake for about an hour, or until your tester comes out clean. Let it cool if you can before diving in!

5 comments:

KimHo said...

Two odd things I noticed in your recipe:

1) Isn't that too much Splenda? If memory serves me right, by volumen, you only need half the amount of Splenda as a replacement, i.e., if you recipe calls for a cup, you would use half a cup of Splenda. If this is true, if you were using regular sugar, that would be 1.5 cups!
2) In a lot of banana bread recipes, it mentioned you should not over-mix the flour; instead, you make sure it is moist (so, technically, if there are flour specks, that is fine).

As for myself, I tend to add crumbled walnuts and/or chocolate chips. I know, that is a real deviation of the regular recipe but it gives an interesting twist, believe me!

Chris said...

Hey KimHo. Great catch about the flour. I always try to include something about mixing, as you don't want to over mix any quick bread batter (as little gluten development as possible). I didn't word it right on this occasion, as it should be "just" mixed, so you can see specks of flour (like a good pancake batter)! Thanks.

I don't find Splenda's double claim to sweetness very accurate, and in saying that, the slice I had wasn't overly sweet at all. If anything, I suppose, I would lay on the sweeter side for my Pops though.

I am a big fan of chocolate chips in the batter as well and find it's nice to rough chop a chocolate bar once in a while, so you get good pockets of chocolate. Oh and the walnuts, I was out, but not yesterday...coming to a quick bread soon post!

Maki said...

I use splenda often in baking and I buy the one-to-one baking splenda. They all have different "formulations" so you have to check what you bought

I'd recommend using some whole wheat flour too as the white stuff is not so good for "pops blood sugars levels". Adding nuts and seeds would help reduce glycemic levels too :)

Chris said...

Oh Maki. I'm totally down with WW and almost solely eat breads and other goods with WW, be it pastry flour in goodies or bread flour. However, those 'evil' whole grains just don't fly for a certain someone; I have made 'healthier' versions but they just end up sitting there.

Anonymous said...

I am diabetic and get sweet cravings all the time, even so I still only used 1/2 cup splenda for this and it turned out perfectly sweet!

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