LiveSTRONG with a Taste of Yellow: Banana Bread with Passionfruit Curd

I may have just missed the (extended) deadline, but I wanted to post up a recipe for Barbara (winosandfoodies)'s LiveSTRONG Day event, a Taste of Yellow, which involved posting up a recipe and photo which includes a yellow ingredient. Last Saturday at the Prahran Market I spotted a bunch of ripe organic bananas, and was inspired from recent food blog perusal to try to bake banana bread for the first time.


I got home and examined the recipes I'd seen online at Not Quite Nigella and Sarah Cooks, and decided to go with Sarah's recipe (well, technically Sarah's recipe is bills "too cool to use an apostrophe" recipe) because I had all of those ingredients in my kitchen. Just for kicks, however, I did throw in about 60g of leftover shredded coconut which I had sitting in my pantry.

Bill Granger's Choc Banana Bread (recipe borrowed from Sarah Cooks)
250g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
125g unsalted butter, softened
250g caster sugar
(optional) 60g shredded coconut
4 ripe bananas, mashed
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract
175g good-quality dark or milk chocolate chips (nb I used little milk chocolate chips - next time I think I'll use darker chocolate buttons, like Sarah used)

Preheat the oven to 180C. Sift the flour and baking powder into a large bowl.

Mix the butter, sugar, banana, eggs, vanilla extract and chocolate chips in a separate bowl. Add to the dry ingredients (including coconut) and stir to combine, being careful not to overmix.

Pour the batter into a non-stick, or lightly greased and floured, miniature loaf tray.

Bake for 45 minutes, or until cooked when tested with a skewer. Leave to cool in the tin for 5 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool.


To make my dish even more yellow, I decided to try making passionfruit curd for the first time, this time pinching the recipe from Not Quite Nigella's Passionfruit Coconut Cupcake recipe. This passionfruit curd was surprisingly easy to make and sooooo yummy. On Monday I took the banana bread in to work and we toasted it in the cafe press until the chocolate was all melty, then spread the passionfruit curd on top - just like I'd had it at The Little Marionette in Sydney. So good!

Passionfruit curd (recipe borrowed from Not Quite Nigella)
2 eggs beaten lightly
1/3 cup caster sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 cup passionfruit pulp
60g butter, chopped coarsely

Combine ingredients in a small heatproof bowl, place over a small saucepan of simmering water, stir constantly until mixture thickens slightly and coats the back of a spoon. Remove from heat. Cover tightly, refrigerate curd until cold.



*** UPDATE ***
To see the other Yellow recipes submitted to the LiveSTRONG With A Taste Of Yellow 2008 thingy, click here.
This recipe was also featured in Not Quite Nigella's Ultimate Banana Bread Recipe Collection - Banana Bread Bake Off, in which a staggering 79 banana bread recipes were submitted!