If you haven’t made banana bread at least once over the last few weeks, where have you been?

With all this time at home, it’s no wonder we’re spending more time in the kitchen, but why has banana bread been such a big hit? It’s the most searched recipe online during the lockdown. Instagram has a lot to do with it with 1.3 million posts tagged #bananabread. One of mine’s in there somewhere.

But, seriously, it seems that everyone has had a go at making banana bread since we went into lockdown. And pizzas, sourdough, dalgona coffee…

At times we’ve struggled to buy flour and eggs, and even a pop to the shops needs military planning, but suddenly everyone wants a piece of the loaf. My local farm shop even had a basket of bananas that were well past their best, offering them for free – Ideal for making banana bread! Waste not want not, I say.

Why not? Banana bread is one of life’s comforts. It’s a cake that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s not fancy or refined. It can even pass as breakfast, absolutely. And it sounds like it’s a bit healthier than it actually is. I think it’s delicious.

Banana Bread Recipes

Just in case you haven’t had a go yet here are some recipes to pick from:

A classic Brilliant Banana Bread from BBC Good Food. This one uses classic cake ingredients and needs banana chips for decoration in addition to the usual ripe bananas in the batter.

Dairy-free Banana Loaf from Jamie Oliver uses dairy-free margarine instead of butter and also ground almonds, but does contain eggs still.

Vegan Banana Bread from The Spruce Eats uses soy milk and rapeseed oil, with pecans or walnuts as optional extras.

Flourless Chocolate Chip Banana Bread from Running with Spoons has no flour, butter or oil in the recipe. Instead, it uses nut butter, coconut palm sugar and oats.

Have you made banana bread yet? What recipe did you use? Tell me Twitter or Instagram.

Even my husband has taken up baking. He who usually avoids everything about making and preparing food has whipped up a banana bread a few times. He’s also baked some scones, peanut & banana cookies, a quiche lorraine and the latest one today is a sticky gingerbread loaf. As he’s made banana bread twice, it’s pretty much his speciality by now, right? On his first attempt, he used a recipe from a cookbook that we have. The second go he used the BBC Good Food recipe above as a guide but went a bit freestyle with some peanut butter. He now thinks he’s Jamie Oliver!