Brown Butter Strawberry Banana Bread

The Banana Bread/Quick Bread obsession continues with this delightful recipe I found on Joy's blog, a combination of all the good things in the world:

• Bananas
• Strawberries
• Butter

Love in a pan. Right there. Anyway, I came home from work slightly early-ish that day (which means I came home on time, yay me!) and was hunting for banana bread that I had baked previously, only it was all gone (again). It is at moments like these that I am thankful I have a prepared pantry (read: impulsive grocery shopper), and also that I'm slightly crazy and always keep a few bananas hidden in a mixing bowl in the top shelf (or else the people in my house would never let it just get all soft and spotted! Stop eating bananas, GEEZ).

Strawberries and bananas are like peanut butter and jelly, they were paired up through some strategic arranged marriage decades ago, and it seems the rest of the world has just gone with it. Why question a good thing, right?

This combo also happens to make my favourite breakfast smoothie, with the addition of vanilla frozen yoghurt, soy milk, weetabix or muesli and a little bit of ice.

Anyway, enough rambling, let's just get on to the good stuff:

Brown Butter Strawberry Banana Bread

from Joythebaker

• 170g unsalted butter, melted and browned to just over 1/2 cup of butter
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup buttermilk (or plain yoghurt, or even sour cream if you must)
• 1 1/4 cup mashed banana (3 medium sized bananas)
• 1/2 cup diced strawberries, plus 1 strawberry thinly sliced for decorating

1. Preheat to 180C, grease your 9x5 inch loaf pan
2. Melt butter in a saucepan over medium heat, it'll start to crackle as it heats. When the crackling subsides, it'll start to brown. Swirl the pan, and when the butter browns and begins to smell amaaazing, remove the pan from the stove and transfer the butter to a small bowl. Set aside to cool
3. In a large bowl, whisk flour, sugar, baking soda, salt and cinnamon
4. In another bowl, whisk eggs, vanilla and buttermilk. Whisk in the mashed bananas, and the cooled browned butter
5. Add all the wet ingredients to the flour mixture and FOLD together (seriously, there's no need to beat with your kitchenaid here, just get the flour wet and just combined)
6. Fold in the strawberries
7. Pour into the prepared pan and top with the strawberry slices. Bake for 50 minutes to an hour (I took mine out slightly early, so it's got a very cakey texture. Try an hour, you want it to be dry, crumbly, bready)
8. Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the pan for another 15 minutes before turning the loaf onto the cooling rack to cool completely

x Nabiya