BANANA BLUEBERRY BUTTERMILK BREAD

Banana blueberry buttermilk bread. Say that five times, fast. 

Quadruple B alliteration. 

I bet most of you have some slowly decaying bananas attracting fruit flies on your counter (or, if you're smart, in your freezer.) Use those bananas to make this. It's a summery twist on banana bread. You could also argue it to be a coffee cake if you wanted to, but I think the blueberries make it a little too moist to qualify it as such. You could sub in some other summer berries if you wanted to. I bet you some raspberries or sliced strawberries would be pretty epic. Or maybe mixed berry bread?

Use this as a starting point, and go nuts (you could add nuts! and chocolate!) If you're like me, and sometimes you want to be the total opposite of nuts and have something so ridiculously basic it's almost offensive, you could just make a totally basic banana bread here, too. Sometimes I'm okay with temporarily being a basic human. But since we've only got berries for another couple of weeks, just be fun for once, okay?

This makes two loaves, so you can totally slice one up, wrap each slice in plastic, and freeze so you have breakfast to go if you need it. Or you could be nice and take a loaf to your new upstairs neighbors, like I did, in hopes that you can be friends or at least deter them from being oblivious and noisy. So far, it seems to be working.

BANANA BLUEBERRY BUTTERMILK BREAD

makes two loaves

3 very ripe bananas
3/4 cup buttermilk
1 egg
3 TB vegetable or canola oil
3/4 cup sugar
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 pint blueberries + 1 TB flour

for the streusel:
5 TB unsalted butter, melted
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
6 TB sugar
1/4 cup old fashioned oats

Directions:

1. Preheat your oven to 350F.
2. Grease or line your loaf pans.
3. In a large bowl, mash up your bananas with a potato masher or a fork.
4. Add buttermilk, egg, oil, and sugar to the bowl. Mix (by hand or with a hand mixer) until thoroughly combined.
5. Add dry ingredients (flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda) to bowl, and stir to combine.
6. Toss blueberries gently with 1 TB flour (this helps keep them from all ending up at the bottom of your loaf!)
7. Stir blueberries into batter.
8. Divide batter evenly between loaf pans.
9. Prepare streusel: combine sugar, flour, and oats in a bowl.  Pour melted butter over the ingredients, and mix until combined. It should be like rough sand.
10. Distribute streusel evenly over batter.
11. Bake at 350F for 30-45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the loaves comes out clean, with no "wet" batter.
12. Cool for at least 45 minutes before removing from pan.
13. Enjoy!