Josh banned me from baking yesterday. All 5 of my kids have been sick with a cold/flu/cough the past two weeks, and a few days ago, I came down with it too. The thing about being sick AFTER your kids are sick is that you can only sympathize with how they felt. I feel badly now about making them do their schoolwork even though they felt like this! I did give them the usual meds, Tylenol, cough drops, cough medicine, etc, but of course, those only temporarily make you feel better and even with the medicine working, you still don’t feel quite yourself. The kids were good sports though and still did their schoolwork despite feeling sick.

Anyway, yesterday I was feeling downright awful, so Josh told me no baking. It was hard to stay out of the kitchen!

Today, I am feeling a little bit better, so I decided to go in the kitchen and bake something pretty easy. Plain banana bread! Knowing me though and my foggy state of mind, I could have easily messed up plain banana bread.

I have a favorite banana bread recipe. You can find it at Simply Recipes.

I did make a few changes to the recipe though, just for fun, and hopefully not for fail!

First few changes: 1/4 cup flaxseed meal, 1/2 cup of maple syrup to replace part of the sugar, and a few shakes of Baking Spice from Penzey’s.

I keep a container of vanilla sugar in my kitchen just for baking. I make it myself because it is cheaper. Dry vanilla beans are covered with sugar in a ceramic container and the sugar sits for 2 weeks. I used a 1/4 cup of this vanilla sugar instead of plain white sugar.

This is the color of the flaxseed meal. Since I used maple syrup (a liquid) as part of the sweetener, I am hoping the 1/4 cup of flaxseed will keep the bread from becoming too moist and being undercooked.

The bread turned out a little bit dark, probably from the brown sugar I sprinkled on top and the maple syrup I used in the batter. This is after baking for 1 hour and 10 minutes. I cut out one piece but it looked like it wasn’t baked enough so I put the bread back into the oven for another 10 minutes.

It turned out that I hadn’t mixed in the mashed banana well enough, so there were little bits of banana throughout the loaf. Oops. Fortunately, my kids who like banana bread didn’t care about that and ate this piece up. The loaf will be gone tomorrow morning after breakfast!

-Lynn