During Cypriot summer, bananas are ‘tanning’ in no time. The best remedy for ‘tanned’ and melting bananas? Good old banana bread! who needs butter when you have a bottle of delicious Colive oil lying around? It is great for baking!

Ingredients:

• 2 cups flour
• 2 cups mashed banana
• 2 eggs (at room temperature)
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup kefir (or strained/ Greek yogurt)
• 1/3 cup Colive Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• A handful of chopped walnuts (or any other nuts that you fancy)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180C
2. Mix flour, salt, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt together
3. In a different bowl, mix brown sugar with eggs (one egg at a time) and make sure they are well mixed (We used a hand mixer at medium setting). Then add the bananas to the mixture (again 1 cup at a time). Then you can add your Colive oil, vanilla extract, and kefir. Make sure you are combining well after each addition to the mixture.
4. Slowly add the dry mix to this wet mixture. Mix well to combine but do not get carried away as ‘t ‘s very easy to over mix. Once everything is combined, add a handful of chopped walnut and fold them into the mixture.
5. Oil your loaf pan with some Colive oil and sprinkle some flour on it and make sure you cover every corner with a light coat of flour so that your banana bread won’t stick.
6. Place in the preheated oven and bake for 30 minutes. Once you reach the 30-minute point, loosely cover with a piece of foil and bake covered for another 30. When you dip your knife or toothpick in, it should come out relatively clean with only some crumbs here and there.

P.S: We like ours a bit ‘well-baked’ so left it in the oven for 80 minutes hence the color :)