February 3rd was National Carrot Cake Day so I decided to bake one as well. But, instead of just a carrot cake, I decided to bake a banana-carrot bread! With no icing because I’m not big on icing, it is too sweet, not good for you and the bread tastes just fine without it. Honestly, it does! Yes, I agree it looks so much better with icing on it but if I have a choice to put a lot of sugar and butter on top of sweets, I prefer not to! Once in a while, it’s ok but not this time 🙂

This is not my recipe, I got the idea from Cinnamon spice & Everything nice with doing a google search on “carrot cake”

PREP+COOKING TIME: 20 min of prepping + 60 min of baking

This recipe is for one loaf. You can either cut big pieces or small pieces and because of that I’m not quite sure how many people it serves 🙂

Ingredients:

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup granulated sugar

3/4 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

2 eggs

1/4 cup vegetable oil

1 teaspoon rum extract (or vanilla)

1 cup mashed banana from very ripe bananas (2 bananas)

¾ firmly packed grated carrots (1 big carrot)

1/3 block of chocolate Philadelphia cream cheese

Preheat oven to 350 F degrees.

Prep your bananas and carrot(s). Mash the bananas and grate the carrot. I used one big carrot.

Add all the dry stuff into a bowl (flour, sugar baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon). Add the wet stuff to dry stuff – eggs, oil and rum extract. My opinion, no need to mix it in another bowl. Mix. And then add bananas and grated carrots. Mix till thoroughly combined.

Pour half the batter into a sprayed baking pan, I use PAM (or just butter it). Then lay a few blocks of cream cheese down the middle. Pour the rest of the batter on top of it!

Bake 60 minutes or until a toothpick poked in the center comes out clean.

I figured the cream cheese would stay in the middle but it just sank through the batter to the bottom, but it was ok, it added some good flavor to the bread! Next time I will add more cream cheese, maybe half a block. And maybe I will bake the bottom layer of batter for about 20 minutes so the cream cheese will not sink through! So learn from my mistakes or just don’t add cream cheese 🙂

It tasted so AWESOME!!! It’s going to be my favourite sweet bread recipe from now on…. 😉