the blackened bananas, thawing all day on a plate on the kitchen counter, seep a thin brown puddle. if you make an incision at one end of the fruit, and apply gentle pressure to the other, the squishy inside glides out whole, and comes to rest curled up like an enormous grub. it is a squeamish and giggly moment, but it is a good thing, because we are one step closer to banana bread.

i’d been hearing about deborah‘s banana bread for a few days — magic loaves that disappeared over a weekend. with little prompting, she pointed me in the direction of the recipe, and offered a tip to swap self-raising flour for the plain with leaveners.

the original recipe is for banana maple bread, but when i tiptoed around the idea of swapping kithul treacle for the maple syrup, deb gave her blessings to go forth! truly the fairy godmother of homebaking, she even voiced the idea i’d had in my head, to sprinkle it in shredded coconut.

although the recipe comes with a warning that the bread “is not super sweet because it has no sugar”, it does ask for 3/4 cup of maple syrup. so i was surprised when it actually wasn’t anywhere as sweet as your typical banana bread. the other surprising thing was that it baked more like a bread than a cake.

i mean, sure it’s called “banana bread”, but it’s normally sweet and moist, and maybe even oily. this wasn’t. my loaf rose magnificently in the pan, almost doubling its height. the first slice i ate, plain and quite recently out of the oven, i was a little disappointed by how unmoist it was, and what a mild flavour it had. but then i realised that this was actually where it was perhaps better than regular banana bread (cake), because it allowed for toppings, without the threat of overwhelming sweetness.

toppings like yoghurt and treacle and toasted coconut. i’ve had this for breakfast four days straight and i’m not sick of it yet. pity the loaf is gone.