Sometimes Things Freeze in the Arctic (Mochi Cake With Black Bananas)

A delicious way to use the unusable, banana mochi bread has the moistness and flavor of banana and the dense, rich texture of mochi cake. Slathered with cream cheese this is a delicious afternoon snack.

Guided by a philosophy of not wanting to waste anything, we are sometimes the recipients of fruit past its prime. This week boxes of bananas arrived for snacks for our students at Tikigaq School in Point Hope, Alaska. Unfortunately, many had frozen on the plane on the way up. Most people will not eat thawed-out, blackened bananas. And then there are people like us.

The obvious response to these bananas was banana bread. I have a tried and true fruit bread recipe which I’ve used for bananas, blueberries, cloudberries, and pears. But this is the time of year to be a bit more creative in order to use up pantry items. With this in mind, I give you mochi banana bread. Mochi is a Japanese creation which uses sweet rice flour to make a dense, rich, but not-too-sweet dessert. With previous success baking a chocolate mochi cake, I wanted to give bananas a try.

The results of this experiment were a sugary-crisp crust enclosing the nicely dense banana bread I was going for. Blog worth! (Of course, we only publish the good stuff!)

Banana Mochi Bread

Ingredients

• 1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 1/4 cup mochiko (sweet rice flour)
• 1 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• pinch salt
• 1 1/2 cups smashed overripe bananas (about 6)
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil (substituting applesauce will lighten the bread)
• 1 tsp Penzeys double strength vanilla extract (or 2 tsp regular vanilla extract)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 9″ x 5″ loaf pan. Set aside.
2. In a medium bowl, thoroughly mix dry ingredients.
3. In bowl of stand mixer, mix together all wet ingredients until thoroughly mixed.
4. Stir dry ingredients into wet. Mix until just incorporated.
5. Pour batter into loaf pan.
6. Bake for 55 – 60 minutes, until toothpick inserted in center of cake comes out clean.
7. Cool loaf pan on wire rack until it can be handled. Then remove loaf from pan and continue cooling on wire rack.