Toasted Coconut Banana Bread with Pecans

Last weekend was cold yet gorgeously sunny. On Friday evenings I usually go grocery shopping after picking up my daughter from school and on this particular weekend, since my husband was also out of town, I decided to indulge in some "retail therapy"  by hitting the mall for some holiday splurging ;-)   I am so glad my daughter loves this kind of therapy too and she usually get down to business right away trying to decide between the brightest pink dresses for me and her. Little girls and their obsession for pink - what can I say?

The next morning I felt the urge to do some healthy baking and made this Banana bread, texturing it with some toasted coconut and nutty pecans that adds an amazing flavor to the loaf! 

The aroma from the freshly baked bread rejuvenated me and I started clicking some random photos of the gorgeous brown eggs as they looked so damn good. I ultimately ended up spending quite some time snapping photos of these eggs from different angles until I was pretty spent. Click-crazy, I know!!  Well, if you did notice those feathers in the wire egg basket and was wondering how I got those, don't worry, I dint hurt any bird to get these as I too am an animal/bird lover at heart! OK here goes the story: We have a lake facing home and during a recent summer evening, while having tea out on the patio, I noticed a few geese fighting furiously and in the process loosing feathers. Well opportunity struck and after the cease-fire and all the geese had left the zone, I bravely ventured out to grab a few feathers for my prop collection. Well, my daughter was curious and excited participant of this whole operation and seemed to have fun. Those few feathers came in handy this past weekend but recently I have been getting some angry "hisses' from the geese and I hope they are not planning an operation to get back their fallen feathers..LOL!!

I have always had a love- hate relationship with bananas. I love them when they are just ripe as soon as they are ripened I hate them. But I love them in baked goods like brown butter banana muffins  that I had posted last year or even in delicious fruit smoothie like the blueberry smoothie with nutella and peanut butter or the cocoa date smoothie. Another way to use the ripened banana is to add them to Payasam (Indian pudding)

Yields - 1 loaf
Ingredients
1/2 cup - Oil
1 cup - Brown sugar,packed
2 - Eggs
3 - Ripe bananas (1½ cups mashed)
½ cup - Buttermilk
1 teaspoon - vanilla extract
1 cup - Whole wheat flour, sifted
1 cup - All purpose flour, sifted
1 teaspoon - Baking soda
1 teaspoon - Baking powder
½ teaspoon - Salt
3/4 cup - Coconut(desiccated or fresh)
1/4 cup - Pecans or walnuts, chopped
1 tablespoon - Chia seeds (optional)

Topping
2 Tablespoons - Coconut(desiccated or fresh)
1/4 Cup - Whole Pecans

Directions

• Preheat the oven to 350F
• Take a heavy bottomed pan toast the coconut until they turn golden brown. Set aside.
• Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt and set aside
• In the stand mixer bowl add brown sugar, eggs and oil and beat on medium speed until all ingredients have been incorporated.
• Add buttermilk, vanilla and mashed bananas and beat again.
• Now add the dry ingredients to the wet little by little. Make sure that you run the mixer on slow speed else you will have flour all over!
• Mix in the toasted coconut, pecans and chia seeds.
• Transfer the batter into a greased loaf pan.
• Top the loaf with coconut and pecans
• Bake for 50-60 minutes or until the inserted toothpick comes out clean.

Notes and Tips

• If you are allergic to coconut, skip this ingredients out and follow rest of the recipe
• You can opt out wheat flour and make this loaf with all purpose flour
• You can add raisins, cranberries or chocolate chips
• This loaf is mildly sweet. You can increase the brown sugar to 1 1/4 cup to make a sweeter bread