Up until this week we had too huge apple and two huge maple trees in our back yard. I won’t lie to you, they were a pain. The only good they served was to cover our lawn with rotten, half eaten apples and dead leaves. The teenage neighbour kids next door spent hours raking the leaves from the branches that drooped into their yard. Our own lawn would become covered in leaves after a mildly blustery day. Mister C and our other neighbour’s two toddlers did love the apples. All the boys loved trampling through their respective yards every afternoon picking up the rotten apples and throwing them into buckets.

Despite the boys love for the trees we kept bugging our landlord to trim them at the very least. They were becoming a nuisance and we were convinced that the ‘thud’ of apples falling on our roof would result in something more serious.

Our landlord finally consented and sent a motley crew to cut the trees. The details escaped us and since we spent most of the day out we missed the progress. Sadly on our return we discovered that rather than trimmed, the trees  had all but dissappeared. All we were left with was stumps. Our backyard is now a blank canvas and both Mr Firehouse and I are feeling quite guilty about colluding to end the lives of these trees.

One good thing that has come of it is that the fruit flies, attracted to the fallen apples, have now started abandoning our house. I bought the bananas for this bread ages ago but couldn’t leave them out on the bench to ripen because they would immediately become covered in fruit flies….blech.  These bananas ripened slowly in the fridge,

I added 1/2 a cup of frozen berries to the mix (see pic above) for something a little different.

Ingredients

• 2 very ripe bananas mashed
• 1 stick (1/2 cup) butter melted
• 1/2 cup maple syrup
• 1 egg
• 3 tbsp. milk
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 2 cups flour (you can substitute one cup for whole wheat flour)
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350 F/180C. Line a loaf/bread tin with baking paper.

In a bowl mix together the mashed banana, butter, maple syrup, egg, milk and vanilla.

In a second bowl mix together the flour, baking powder and salt.

Mix together the wet and dry ingredients. Don’t over mix.

Pour the batter into the lined cake tin and bake for 45-50 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.