Banana Bread Waffles

Oh, Breakfast, how do I love thee?

I. Love. Breakfast. What not to love? You get to drink copious cups of fresh, steaming coffee. If you are having eggs, then you get to choose how every item on the plate is cooked. You get to have bacon! You get to have either savoury or sweet foods. You get to have pastries. Oh, and did I say bacon? I feel like it deserves more than one mention!

A. and I rarely go out for dinner now. There are many reasons, it’s inconvenient with us living in suburbs, it takes a lot of time, it’s often not as satisfactory as eating homemade food, it’s almost always too salty for our tastes. But we do go out for breakfast! That’s one of our favourite things to do. In fact, we love breakfast so much that for our wedding we did not have a traditional dinner reception, instead we had brunch. It was awesome… I don’t remember much since I sort of had an out of body experience and blanked out, but people say it was great.

I don’t make proper breakfast every weekend, sometimes we have leftovers or just toast and coffee, but I try to make something yummy and delicious or fun at least a couple of times a month.

This time we had bananas that needed to either be turned into a Banana Bread asap or be thrown out. I hate throwing food away and I did not feel like making a cake, so I thought I’d come up with my own Banana Bread Waffles. They turned out really good. So good, in fact, that I made the same recipe two weeks later and I’m sure it’ll be my default waffle recipe along with my Yogurt Pancakes. 

Banana Bread Waffles

I have a 6-waffle Cuisinart waffle maker and this recipe makes about 18-20 of those smaller size waffles

Bananas, very ripe – 2 large
Eggs – 2 extra large
Plain Greek yogurt – 1/2 cup
Milk – 1/2 cup
Brown sugar – 2 tablespoons (optional)
Orange oil – 1/4 teaspoon
Quick oats – 1/3 cup
Baking powder – 1 1/2 teaspoons
Flour – 1 cup
Salt – a pinch
Oil or melted butter – 2 tablespoons
Pecans, roughly chopped – 1/3 cup
Oil for brushing on the waffle iron

• In a large bowl, mash bananas with a fork.
• Add eggs and mix well.
• Add yogurt, milk and whisk into smooth mixture.
• Add brown sugar if using.
• Add orange oil, oats, baking powder, salt, flour and mix until lumpy batter forms and flour is no longer visible. Don’t mix to make the batter smooth. It needs to be lumpy.
• Add oil or melted butter to the batter and mix.
• Add chopped pecans and mix.
• Prepare waffle iron and make waffles according to the waffle iron instructions.

Comments

– I added brown sugar first time I made the waffles and forgot to add it the second time. I love eating my waffles with maple syrup, so I didn’t miss not adding sugar to the batter at all, especially since they are already sweetened with bananas.

– I already mentioned countless times that I adore Orange Oil. It gives all the baked goods a hint of something elegant and exotic. It’s one of my mostly used ingredients in baking and I highly recommend it. It’s expensive but it lasts for a long time. If you can’t find Orange Oil, then you can add a little bit of orange zest instead.

– You can also add more pecans or omit them. Or, actually, add other kinds of nuts. I feel like almonds would work really well there too.

– I haven’t tried it, but I am almost 100% positive that this batter would work really well as pancakes too!

And a few more photos because I thought they turned out so well and I couldn’t decide on just two to post.