🐼 Steemit Iron Chef 2017 #09 Banana,Orange &Walnut Bread

Happy to be early again this week with my entry. I made a banana loaf with orange juice, dates and walnuts and served it with banana flambe

Banana was the theme and so I made the famous banana bread with a difference. As I love banana's but have never enjoyed fried or cooked bananas, and have never been a fan of banana bread I decided to try and make one that I would enjoy. One of my favourites is date and walnut loaf and I love orange cake.

I started out early and went to the market where I was lucky to find the last bunch of bananas

My previous guest bought a bunch of fresh dates for me. I had never seen nor tasted these before

My first instincts was that I needed to caramelize them so I chopped them into small pieces and fried them in butter and brown sugar. I called a friend and mentioned that I was going to put this in my mixture and she suggested that I rather use the fresh dates as they would be lovely once baked in the mix. I then decided to use them for garnish.

Happy to see this heart shape - and it was completely unintentional

When I make a date and walnut or date and pecan nut cake I usually blend by hand. Today I decided to blend in my Ninja. So ingredients were as follows:

1.5 cups of flour, 100g butter, half a cup of brown sugar, 2 eggs, a cup of orange juice, grated rind from the orange and a cup of fresh dates, 1 tsp baking powder and 1 tsp baking soda, 3 ripe bananas and chopped walnuts.

First I beat the butter and sugar and then added the eggs and orange juice and then the rest of the ingredients. Placed this in a loaf pan and added a few nuts to the top.

I baked it in the oven for 45 minutes and then placed on cooling tray for about 15 mins.

Luckily I had the garnish as from the pic you can see my oven was a little hot and the loaf cracked

Voila - the crack hidden

And @deimus kindly came along and took some proof pics for me - I only needed one but they were all so good I decided to use more than one

Then I decided to do flambe banana to serve with it

This was a lot of fun - melted butter and brown sugar with some brandy. When turned and cooked on both sides I added rum and set alight until the rum burned out.

and finally served.

I have to say that I loved the taste of the loaf, the orange juice and the fresh dates gave it the most amazing taste - I'm a fan and will definitely make this dish again.