Revolutionary raisins

Raisin POW Camp

People are strange. Well OK then, I am strange. This was the thought that occurred to me as I stood over the bag of Muesli last weekend, plucking out the raisins one by one. Not with a view to eating them you understand. No, much as I like fruit cake, Maltana, mince pies, pain au raisin – need I go on? – I really dislike dried fruit in my breakfast cereal. I'm not generally suspicious of raisins, so I haven’t quite managed to put my finger on the reason why. I think it’s the chewiness of them, the way they stick to my teeth and disturb the crunchy flow of the rest of the bowl. Whatever it is, it clearly doesn’t affect the majority of muesli eaters, since it seems to be impossible to buy a bag of non-fruity muesli (full disclosure here - I haven't actually tried too hard, so if you know of any, do let me know), and I recently read a column in a glossy mag, whose author claimed to have a special bag shake, designed with the sole purpose of getting more than her fair share of raisins from bag to bowl (No.3 Sister would applaud this). 

All of this means I may be alone in my War on Muesli Raisins, bringing us full circle to me having to pick them out as I go and no matter how diligent I am, there’s always one I miss –  a rebel raisin hunkered down behind a wheat flake or sheltered by a hazelnut, ready to sneak his way onto my spoon and upset my morning repast. Usually, I carry out Operation Raisin on the fly, nabbing them from the bowl on an ad hoc basis, but today I tried a more direct approach – shovelling the muesli about in the bag with a spoon and gathering up as many of the little blighters as I could see. As a result I now have a small bowl full of desiccated, dusty raisins and seeing them all together like that made me sad. (In a strange twist, having just watched a documentary on Bronze Age mummies in Britain, looking at them now also makes me think of mummification. Strike two against the Muesli Raisins.) 

Mummified raisins reincarnated as yummy banana bread

Mummified or not, it would be such a shame to simply dump them, when they could be rinsed, re-plumped and given a much happier ending in something baked and delicious. I am quite the Thrifty Queen and it galls me to throw out perfectly good ingredients that could be recycled - or up-cycled, as the current vogue would have it - to create, in this case, a loaf of banana bread. I had initially thought of making a yeasted malt loaf (yum) but I hadn't manage to extract quite enough raisins (I was 50g short). The re-plumping issue also made me think of banana bread - my recipe involves soaking raisins in Pedro Ximinez sherry before making the loaf (see below). To top it all off, I had some over-ripe bananas sitting patiently in the freezer just waiting for their time to shine. Banana bread it was.

Readers, it was a good one - moist and more-ish, using half muscovado sugar and half caster sugar upped the fudgy flavour, with the bananas lending a toffee-ish note, a hint of dark chocolate in the background from a spoonful of cocoa and just a touch of deep fruitiness from the raisins soaked in sherry. From dusty, outcast raisins to mummies and delicious banana bread - my mind is indeed a wondrously strange place, but if this is where it leads me, I'm good with that.
Banana Bread 

100g sultanas or raisins (mummified or otherwise!)
75ml Pedro Ximinez Sherry
155g plain Flour
20g cocoa (Green & Blacks if you can)
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarb of soda
125g salted butter (melted)
75g light muscovado sugar
75g caster sugar
2 large eggs
4 small, very ripe bananas, mashed (about 300g weighed without the skin)
1 tsp vanilla extract

Put the raisins / sultanas and sherry in a small saucepan and bring to the boil. Remove from heat, cover and leave for an hour if you can, or until the fruit has absorbed most of the liquid, then drain.

Preheat the oven to 170 C and line a loaf tin (about 23 x 13 x 7 cm). 

Sieve the flour, cocoa, baking powder and bicarb of soda together. In a separate bowl, mix the melted butter, sugar and vanilla extract until blended. Add the eggs one at a time, then the mashed bananas and drained sultanas / raisins. Add the dried ingredients a third at a time, stirring well after each bit. Scrape into the loaf tin and bake in the middle of the oven for about 1-1 1/4 hours. When it's ready, an inserted skewer should come out clean-ish. Leave in the tin on a rack to cool.