Brown Butter Banana Bread

I’ve unpacked the moving boxes of the essentials:  sock slippers, gin, loaf pan, spatula, and mixing bowl.  I’ve managed to find the fancy candles I love,  a few pictures of my family, and the face wash.  The cookbooks are lined up on the book shelf, color-coded just like Shutterbean taught me.

I’m just far enough in the whole moving process to miss home.  Strange because I am home.  It’s just that I have to build up a familiarity to this new space. I don’t yet know its nuances.

What I do know is that I’m mostly responsible for feeling at home where I’m home.  It’s a state of mind.  It’s coming to understand the different shade of light.  It’s the different sounds of the street.  It’s the familiar smell of comfort.  Banana Bread feels like home, so Banana Bread it is!

We’re not looking to reinvent the wheel here.  This banana bread is more about settling in and planting roots.  It’s tastes just like home to me, and so it is!

I love that banana bread comes together rather effortlessly.  A bowl, fork, and spoon and we’re in business.

Good news for all of us, right?

Mashed bananas are stirred together with granulated sugar and molasses.  I realized too late that I’m fresh out of brown sugar.  We can make our own…. or just stir it all together with gumption.

Butter is melted until it’s golden brown and smells juuuuust nutty.  I love the depth that brown butter adds to the banana bread.  Extra goodness, that’s all it is.

Oh!  I don’t have buttermilk either.  I squeezed a big wedge of lime into a bit of milk.  Buttermilk substitutions are key.

Eggs and butter into the banana mash.

No nuts.  No toasted coconut.  Nothing too fancy.  Just cinnamon spiced, brown butter magic banana bread.

The smell that fills the kitchen is home exactly.

I thought about sharing this loaf with my neighbors, but there’s plenty of future for that.  I just needed to sit in from of this warm loaf and breathe it in.  The texture is dense but soft.  It’s lightly cinnamon spiced and hearty in the way that feels just right in the morning.  This banana bread is sweet and I find it’s best paired with a cup of milky coffee.  Slice into thick wedges.  No need to be coy.  We’re home.