Cooking for Colleagues

I work in a fab little office in central London with some people who are scarily knowledgeable about coins and medals.  Whenever I offer to bake, they respond enthusiastically and eat whatever I make with equal enthusiasm, something which is always good for a cook's ego!

Recently, my lovely colleagues have not been forced to sample my cooking endeavours, so I decided it was time to roll up my sleeves again and get baking for them.  Given the choice of fruit or chocolate, they, surprisingly, went for fruit (apparently it makes a change from the huge quantities of chocolate biscuits we devour between us)

I had three sad looking bananas in my fruit bowl, so it seemed only fair that they be whisked and cheered into something scrumptious.  Banana bread has a long standing place in my life: it's not something I ate often as a child and there was something amazing about a banana being turned into a soft, moist cake which I adored. 

When my mum used to make carrot cake, it would always have sultanas and chopped nuts in it, so I stole this idea and added it to the banana bread, plumping up the sultanas with brandy which makes them soft and smell luscious.

Banana Bread with sultanas, nuts and a cheeky drop of brandy
3 ripe bananas, mashed until smoothish
125g butter, melted
90g demarara sugar
70g dark brown sugar
2 eggs
100g sultanas
75ml brandy
40g chopped nuts
175g wholemeal/brown flour
1 tsp salt
1 tp bicarbonate of soda

Preheat the oven to 180C
1) Put the sultanas and brandy in a pan and bring to a boil; remove from the heat after around a minute and set aside. 
2) Mix together the sugars and the molten butter and then add in the eggs, followed by the mashed banana.  I did all this with an electric whisk.
3) Fold in the nuts, the sultanas (including any juice left over), followed by the flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda.  Mix until you can no longer see any flour.
4) Tip the mixture into a lined loaf tin (mine is a fairly standard size and is around 6cmx10cmx22cm) and put in the oven for an hour, or until a skewer comes out clean.

This smells delicious when it's cooking and I have just returned to the house after going out earlier and the air is perfumed with a lovelly smell of warm banana bread, which is very inviting, even if  say so myself!

The poor cake has had to be cut in half so I could take a photo of the scrumptious inside, so I will have to apologise to the office!  I am just hoping the taste will compensate for a semi-ravaged loaf!