Warm Spice Banana Loaf with Salted Maple Pecan Crunch

It is quite well known that Australians do love their banana bread. It graces the menu's of pretty much every café I've been to and you can always find it accompanying your usual muffins and pastries in the coffee shop counters. So I've decided to pay a little homage to my current locale whilst incorporating the warm flavours of home that I'm missing this from your traditional English winter and all the Autumn, Christmas and cosy baking I usually do. 

The Salted Maple Pecan Crunch is probably one of the best things I've ever accidentally made and I encourage you to make a huge batch to snack on, eat with cheeses and top any sweet treats with.

Prep Time: 30 minutes
Bake Time: 25 minutes / time needed to get cosy, pour a glass of wine and do a face mask

You will need a deep sided loaf tin.

Ingredients:

For the loaf:

• 3 brown bananas, big 
• 2 cups self-raising flour
• 1 1/2 cups raw sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 50g softened unsalted butter
• 1tsp vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup maple syrup
• 1 tsp cinnamon powder
• 1 tsp freshly grated nutmeg 
• 1cm piece of ginger, peeled and finely grated

For the salted maple pecan crunch:

• 2 large handfuls of pecans, cut into chunks (or however many you want)
• 1/4 maple syrup
• 2 tsp sea salt

Method:

Making the loaf cake:

Preheat the oven to 180C.

Put the butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl and whisk until fully combined and the butter has gone lighter in colour and is almost fluffier.

Break in both the eggs and whisk again until fully incorporated.

Add the maple syrup, vanilla extract, ginger and nutmeg and mix until combined. 

In a separate bowl mash the bananas until mostly smooth but don't worry about any small lumps. Add this to the wet ingredients and mix.

Sieve in the flour, baking powder and cinnamon. Fold through until all the flour is incorporated. Don't over mix. The batter should be quite thick. 

Grease the load tin with butter and then line with baking paper. Pour in the batter and smooth out with the back of a spoon. 

Bake on the middle shelf until a skewer or knife pushed into the centre comes out clean. If you're cooking in a gas oven rather than a fan be sure to rotate the loaf cake halfway through to ensure an even bake. If you notice the top of the cake getting too dark before the cake is cooked through just cover it with foil for the remainder of the time.

Once cooked, remove form the oven and leave to cool inside the loaf tin. Leave the oven on to make the pecan crunch.

Making the Salted Maple Pecan Crunch:

Make this once you've taken the loaf cake out of the oven to cool. 

Line a baking tray with baking paper.

In a bowl mix the pecans and maple syrup so that the pecans are coated in the syrup. Lay them out onto the lined baking tray so that none are overlapping. Evenly sprinkle over the sea salt.

Place in the preheated oven (180C) for about ten minutes. 

Remove from the oven and using a spoon and being very careful mix the pecans around. The syrup will be extremely hot, slightly bubbling and still very liquid. Leave to cool for 5 minutes and they will begin to get stickier. Then pour them on top of the banana loaf and they will continue to get stickier. 

This cake is dense rather than light and airy and it will hold its own rather than being too crumbly. You can slice it up and eat it as soon as its cool enough or you can wait, cut off a thick slice, toast it in the grill so it warms up again and gets a little crunchy and then serve with whipped salted butter. To make this just whip up some butter until lighter and fluffier and add sea salt. Mmmmm, just try not to eat the whole loaf a once. 

Love, Rachael x