Dutch zelfrijzend Banana Bread

I have a big fat binder full of tried and true recipes I've collected over the years. Trying to travel with little weight I decided to leave it in storage when we moved. In it is a frequently used banana bread recipe. When I noticed I had enough overly ripe bananas for bread I realized that recipe probably wouldn't have done much good anyway since European recipes tend to rely on weight measurements, not cups and spoons. I have a nice big scale in our kitchen here and neither of those cups and spoon sets so European-version recipe it was.

I googled up a new banana recipe and found one in German that sounded nice. This one uses yogurt, something I had wanted to try in my breads and muffins anyway (and we had some in the fridge). I went to the store, picked up the last missing ingredients, came home and got to work. Banana bread is pretty easy, so there really isn't much work. I just had to get used to using the scale and since I wanted to try out the convection oven, did a little math to compensate.

I also wanted to adjust the recipe slightly to add some of my own favorites: chopped walnuts, chocolate flakes and vanilla. I found vanilla sugar at the store, have never used it before but figured hey, substitute for some of the sugar right?

Cut to the mess you see pictured above.

Now, I'm really good at following a recipe. Promise. And I was looking forward to that banana bread. But any number of things could have gone wrong here. Never having used it before, I probably shouldn't have gone for the convection setting. I double checked all my calculations but the scale in the kitchen could be off. Was it the vanilla sugar? The baking powder I bought actually said "baking powder" in english so that couldn't be it. The eggs were very fresh. The flour...oh.

The label on the bag o flour I had picked up read "zelfrijzend bakmeel" or as I like to say "self-rising flour". The kind where when you use it, you DO NOT want to add baking powder and salt or if you instead have the all-purpose kind you want to add baking powder and salt. I grabbed whatever was prominently on display on the shelf (much like you find the all-purpose kind in the US) and for the first time ever didn't really read my label (see: things you don't want to do in your second week of living in a foreign country). And then I added baking powder and salt basically doubling the effect.

Go me!

European recipe vs Doris: 1:1