Suzanne Askham

Wellbeing notes: Banana bread/tray bake recipe

There’s something about February. The land is just beginning to warm up, the days are becoming longer, and the snowdrops and aconites in nearby Lacock Abbey gardens are splashing the ground with beauty. After a bracing walk outdoors, it’s the perfect time to enjoy simple home comforts – including, very possibly, some easy baking.

One of my family’s favourite everyday recipes is banana bread. The version we like best comes from BBC Good Food. All you need is 140g each of butter, sugar and self-raising flour, two eggs, one teaspoon of baking powder and – of course – a couple of very ripe, mashed bananas.

Instead of the caster sugar that the BBC recipe calls for, we make use of whatever sugar is in the kitchen: granulated, or perhaps soft brown. We’ve discarded the old loaf tin in favour of a silicon, traybake mould –18cm x 18cm – which bakes quicker. When it’s out of the oven we drizzle it with around 70g icing sugar dissolved in a few teaspoons of water. And, as soon as it’s cool enough, we cut it into springy, fragrant squares roughly the size of a cupcake. There should have been more slices to include in this illustrative photo, but half of them were eaten straight away!

Banana bread is a great example of kitchen therapy – simple dishes, made mindfully, can be hugely soothing to the cook. The traybake pictured here was made during stormy weather, and the contrast between howling winds outside and cosy domesticity indoors is something to be cherished.