Buckwheat Banana Bread with Pecan Cream Cheese.

Buckwheat Banana Bread topped with dollop of cream cheese with Pecans.

One of our favorite comfort snack food is Banana bread – my kids love it and its a great way to use up those ripe bananas that you are ready to throw away.

We went on a trip recently with a bunch of friends and went to this restaurant that served the best banana bread ever. It was also such a coincidence that once we got back home and I was unpacking and cleaning up, i stumbled upon these dark brown bananas that i had left back home which was so ripe and i was a 100% sure that none of us would consume it:)

Instead of throwing it away, I figured that the best use of it would be if I can use them in banana bread!!! Voila!

But the issue I have with the normal banana bread is that its made of all purpose flour and plenty of sugar:( One recipe (-the one from food network) calls for 8 tablespoons of unsalted butter and 1 cup of granulated sugar!!!!!). So i decided to try and spin a healthy version and i think I succeeded. I baked some yesterday and it was all gone by last night:)

I have to share this recipe with you and I PROMISE you will not even know that I used Buck wheat flour and Agave in my recipe. My kids kept asking for more last evening and I was one lucky happy mom:)

Here goes the recipe:

Ingredients

2 eggs

3-4 ripe bananas

1 tablespoon milk

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 1/2 cup of Buckwheat flour

1 teaspoon clarified butter

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons of honey or agave

2 teaspoons of low fat cream cheese

5-6 pecans chopped up

Preparation:

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Spray the muffin pans or you could use 9 x 5 x 3 inch loaf pan.

Whisk the Honey/ Agave and clarified butter in a large mixing bowl along with the eggs. Add the eggs one at a time gradually while whisking until light and fluffy.

In a small bowl, mash the bananas with a fork. Mix in the milk and cinnamon.

mashed bananas with milk and cinnamon

whisked up bananas, milk and cinnamon

whisk eggs along with agave and clarified butter

In another bowl, take 1 1/2 cups of buckwheat flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt and mix all the dry ingredients well.

Add the banana mixture to the agave-egg whisked creamed mixture and stir thoroughly.
Now slowly add dry ingredients, mixing continuouly until flour disappears. You can use a hand blender if you have one since it helps in mixing uniformly without forming lumps.

mix the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients

Pour batter into prepared muffin pan and bake 20-30 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Set aside to cool on a rack for 15 minutes. Remove bread from pan, invert onto rack and cool completely before slicing.