EGGLESS HIMALAYAN WALNUTS BANANA BREAD

Winters are setting in. Warm clothes are out of the closet. Mornings begin with cups of steaming tea infused with ginger and cardamom.  It’s a welcome change of the seasons. Diwali is also round the corner. There is frenzy buying happening in the market. We also set out with our jute shopping bags having decided to buy “what we need” and not “what we want”.  In a corner of the vegetable market, a seemingly fatigued but cheerful old woman was sitting with a small heap of walnuts. She had come all the way from a village in the outskirts of Almora (Uttarakhand). She had got walnuts from her trees to sell in the market. After selling them, she would shop for diwali and catch the last bus that would drop her to Almora from where she would walk to her village. We were so overwhelmed by her persona that we bought the “Himalayan Walnuts” from her. These walnuts had really hard shells. It required a lot of effort and equipments to draw the nuts out of them.

But the hard work was rewarding. The nut  were very soft, milky and sweet. Since we had a bunch of ripe bananas at home, the best option was to make “Himalayan Walnut Banana bread”.

Ingredients

4 ripe bananas pureed

¾  cup whole wheat flour (atta)

¾ cup all purpose flour

½ cup(100 gms) butter

½ cup chopped walnuts

1 cup powdered sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 ½ teaspoon vanilla essence

½ teaspoon salt

Method

Beat butter and sugar till light and fluffy. Add vanilla essence. Now add pureed bananas and mix well. Sieve together whole wheat flour, all purpose flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Now add the sieved flour to the wet ingredients in parts. Mix well ensuring there are no lumps. Sprinkle flour on chopped walnuts and toss well so that walnuts are coated with flour. Add this to the batter and stir once. Pour the batter into a greased and lined 9”x 5” loaf tin. Bake in a pre heated oven at 180 degrees for 1 hour or till the skewer inserted in the center comes out clean.

  

slice when cold.