Mrs. Johnson’s Banana Bread

My kids love banana bread. I didn’t realize how little I made it until they started asking about it recently. And then Mr. Hedin and I remembered the church cookbook recipe he used to use to make banana bread when we were first married.

It was a great recipe.

So I dug out the old church cookbooks on a mission to find it. Every one of the recipes looked wrong. None of them were what we remembered. I started with the first one, recipe submitted by Mrs. Johnson. And it was good, but needed something.

So I went on to the next one, submitted by a different Mrs. Johnson. Also, delicious - but a lot of dairy added for something that seemed like it should be as few ingredients as possible.

The third recipe - submitted by yet another Mrs. Johnson - was getting closer, but still not it.

So I took all three Mrs. Johnson’s recipes and started on my very own version of Mrs. Johnson’s Banana Bread. When the cookbook you are using is the Swedish Church cookbook, the odds of every woman being Mrs. Johnson are fairly high.

Mrs. Johnson’s Banana Bread

½ cup melted butter, cooled

3 extremely ripe bananas, mashed

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

STEP 1

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease two loaf pans with butter. In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine butter, bananas, sugar, eggs and vanilla. Beat until well blended. If your bananas weren’t well mashed, they should be now.

STEP 2

Add flour, baking powder and baking soda. Mix until just combined. Evenly pour half into each greased loaf pan and pop in the oven.

STEP 3

Bake 40 minutes then remove from the oven and let rest - covered with a piece of foil - for another 20 minutes. Eat hot with butter, wrap in foil (when totally cooled) and freeze, or toast it up for breakfast. Pearl even made s’mores with slices of banana bread.