With Elvis’ birthday coming up and all, I was inspired by the Baking Bites post on Peanut Butter Swirl Banana Bread to do some experimentation of my own.

I made the peanut butter swirl as written, although I added some chopped peanuts along with the smooth peanut butter. The texture was… weird. Sort of grainy, sort of sticky… I had hopes it would even out in the cooking, but those hopes, as you’ll see later, were disappointed.

For the banana bread, I used my favorite Banana Bread recipe, which I got from an old cookbook of recipes written by science fiction authors (called “Serve it Forth : Cooking with Anne McCaffrey“). It’s Kathy Tyers’ Four-Generation Banana Bread from the Philippines, and I’ve found it to make a wonderfully flavorful banana bread that is moist and spiced, not bland nor dry.

The last tweak I made was to do muffins instead of a loaf. Muffins are easier to offload onto coworkers, for one, and for another, I needed more muffin pictures. 🙂 The batter filled 12 muffin tins almost perfectly full, and I added a dollop (about a TB, I would imagine) of the PB mixture to the top center of each, figuring it’d sink in a little. I could have tried to hide it inside by pouring half full, putting the dollop, then the other half, but who has the time? Not me.

Here’s how it looked:

The verdict? The banana bread part was, as always, fabulous. Lovely crunchy edges on the spillover (despite them being filled almost 100% full, there wasn’t much spillage – just enough), and moist, and it looks pretty enough, but the peanut-butter filling just wasn’t interesting. Sort of grainy, still, and wet. I’ve put them in the fridge overnight to see if they’ll firm up and be more interesting in the morning.

Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Filling

(from Baking Bites)

4-oz cream cheese, room temperature

1/2 cup peanut butter (pref. crunchy)

1 large egg yolk

1/4 cup granulated sugar

Kathy Tyers’ Four-Generation Banana Bread from the Philippines

(Adapted from Serve it Forth)

Ingredients:

1 cup walnuts, coarsely chopped

3 ripe bananas

1/2 cup milk

2 cups flour (I used white lily)

1 cup sugar

1/3 cup oil (I usually replace with unsweetened applesauce, but was out)

1 egg

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp nutmeg

1/4 tsp ground cloves

Preheat oven to 350F.

Grease a 12-cup muffin tin.

Preparation:



Mash together bananas and milk until it’s ‘like a milkshake’. Leave some chunks if you like that in your final bread.

Mix together sugar, oil/appesauce, egg, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves until well mixed.

Add liquids and flour in alternating batches, ending with flour. This recipe tolerates thorough mixing quite well, but try not to overdo it. Fold in the walnuts.

Fill muffin tins almost completely full. Add to each a dollop (about 1 TB) of peanut-butter mixture.

Bake at 350F for about 30 minutes, until tester in outer edges (remember ,the middle is peanut-butter) comes out dry.

(If making an entire loaf, bake for approx. one hour)