and Buzzfeed video producer and I love cooking a lot.

I also love baking, especially sweet things,

and today I am gonna try and make banana bread

using 10 hacks that my friend Annie

found for me off of the internet.

You guys might've seen Rie do this before,

she made cake and cookies using a bunch of hacks

and they turned out pretty awesome.

I love banana bread and I have a go-to recipe

that I've been doing since I was in college.

It's super moist and it always gives me

that beautiful fluffy texture.

I love making them in muffin pans

because they're perfect to share.

Let's get started!

I have my bananas with me and my banana bread recipe

usually asks for three bananas, but the first hack

I saw said that you should always add more bananas

than you need, so I'm going to add in another banana.

It's supposed to give it a bolder banana flavor

which sounds promising, but I just hope

that it doesn't affect the ratio

of all the other ingredients.

You guys might've noticed that my bananas

aren't exactly that ripe yet, but supposedly there is a way

to instantly ripen them by putting them in the oven

and baking them for 15 to 20 minutes.

I've already lined my baking sheet with foil

and I'm just going to put my four bananas on here,

and what I'm gonna do is bake them in the oven

at 300 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 to 20 minutes.

I'm really, really curious to know how that's gonna work out

because it could be super useful,

so let's check back in in 15 to 20 minutes.

Okay, you guys, it has been 20 minutes

and this is what our bananas look like right now.

They are a completely different color.

So I flipped them around halfway into the cooking time.

This is what the hack said that they would turn out to be

but it's still so amazing seeing that transition.

We are gonna peel it open now

and scrape off the insides I guess into a bowl.

It definitely smells a little bit interesting right now,

I have to admit that it does not look

the most appealing right now but it is very, very soft,

it's very tender so I guess that's right.

So now I'm just going to really quickly

peel the rest of my bananas.

It gets the job done, so I think it does work.

There's definitely a lot of water.

I don't know if you guys can tell, all this liquid

is in there, so I'm going to drain the liquid.

Now I'm just gonna mush it together

and then add the rest of our wet ingredients.

Now that we have the banana all mashed together

and I've also put some eggs in it,

we are going to go into our brown sugar.

This is what my brown sugar looks like right now,

it is rock hard, so what I'm going to do

is actually follow this hack

that says to microwave it to soften it.

And to do that, we are gonna grab some paper towels

and just wet them a little bit,

drape the wet towel over the brown sugar.

I think we're gonna microwave them for 20 second intervals

and then kind of try to break them apart

every 20 seconds until they're completely soft again.

So I ended up microwaving this for 60 seconds,

it actually worked!

Obviously there's still a little bit of lumps,

but they're super easy to break apart now.

This is around a cup of brown sugar.

So I'm just gonna go ahead and add my brown sugar

into the banana puree that we have.

Once the brown sugar and banana is combined,

we can now add in the buttermilk.

And here's the thing, if you don't have buttermilk at home,

the hack is that you can make your own buttermilk

by combining lemon juice with milk.

And honestly, this is already something

that I do a lot so I love this hack.

Let it sit for five to 10 minutes

and we should have buttermilk.

There's one cup of milk here and one tablespoon

of lemon juice and we really only need a quarter cup

of buttermilk, so I'm gonna add just a little bit in here.

This is what our banana bread mixture looks like right now,

looks like very thick applesauce.

I'm gonna add in my oil.

I like using oil instead of butter for this

because I feel like the oil is actually

what makes the banana bread so fluffy and keeps it so moist.

Adding a splash of vanilla as well.

Supposedly adding this adds a subtle citrus flavor

and also makes it a little more moist

so if that's true, this will be really cool to see.

Baking powder and baking soda.

And so one of the hacks actually says

that there are ways to test your baking powder

and baking soda to make sure that they're still good to use

which could be helpful considering

how these are some of the things

that sit around our pantry for forever.

For baking soda, what they said

is that you should get a bowl, grab some vinegar,

or lemon juice, anything that's a little bit acidic,

and then put some baking soda in there.

If your baking soda is still good,

you should get some bubbles.

My baking soda is good to go, it passed!

So I'm gonna swap it out now and test out my baking powder.

With baking powder, you need to get some hot tap water.

I'm going to add in our baking powder

and if all is good, I should also

be getting some bubbles, so.

I think this is a pretty good test.

If you just have these lying around in your pantry

and you're not sure if they're still good to go,

now you know when to put them on your grocery list.

I'm gonna go ahead and add the baking soda

and baking powder to the flour.

So after that's done, I'm just adding in some salt,

a little bit of cinnamon,

and also some freshly grated nutmeg.

Gonna give this a quick toss.

All right, so now that I have my dry ingredients

and my wet ingredients, I am going to combine the two.

So we sift this in and make it

into our final banana bread mixture.

It is looking pretty good you guys.

So far it's looking pretty promising,

I'm glad we made it this far with all our hacks.

The next step really is to put it in into muffin tins.

Annie found this cool hack where you can actually

use parchment paper as cupcake liners

if you don't have the normal cupcake holders.

What you have to do is get some parchment paper

and find a glass or a cup

that kind of fits into the muffin pan.

What we're gonna do is essentially put the parchment paper

on top of the pan and kind of just squish it down,

and then what we're gonna do is essentially

just fold it in so that it retains its shape best as we can,

so then when I remove it, we get this shape

that is not quite like a cupcake liner,

but I guess that it gets the job done.

And we're gonna kind of squish that in there.

I can see where this is going and I feel like

it would be effective, I just don't know

if it is worth the time and effort.

So I think I'm just going to test

maybe one or two on the side.

The other thing that I saw was that you could use

an ice cream scoop to scoop the batter out.

I also only have a baby ice cream scoop,

so I'm not sure how useful this is going to be,

but we can give it a few tries.

You can actually try to fill your muffin cups

a lot more than you usually do.

So I feel like normally we say you can stop around 2/3,

if you want it to look more like the muffins we see outside,

they say the more batter, the better.

I am going to fill all these up almost 3/4 of the way full,

maybe that'll give us that beautiful size we want.

I have my muffin tin here, I've filled everything up,

we are gonna pop this in the oven and bake it for 20 minutes

and we'll see how it compares to the original ones.

It smells amazing in here,

it just smells like banana bread everywhere.

This is one of the reasons why I love making it at home.

I drizzled some icing on it.

It's a lot bigger than what my normal size is.

This is what mine usually turn out like

and this is what we have today.

Texture is what I'm interested in, and also flavor.

So we're gonna give this a little taste test.

They're both really good, they taste very, very similar.

I feel like there's an extra sweetness in this one,

like a different layer of sweetness in there

so I don't know if it's the orange,

and if it is, then I'm all for it.

This is actually really good, surprisingly really good

considering the amount of things we threw in there.

In terms of banana taste, I really think

throwing your bananas in the oven and letting it

just ripen real fast is a hack that is totally usable.

You still get that texture, everything else is on point

so I'm really, really pleasantly surprised.

It just doesn't look that appealing in the beginning.

Remember the one with the parchment paper?

This is what it looks like now.

I kind of really like it.

I know I said it was a little more time consuming,

but if you don't have cupcake liners,

it actually turns out to be pretty cool.

Before we go, there is one last hack we have to try

which is to toast the banana bread and add butter on it.

It's supposed to make it even better.

I have some toasted banana bread.

I'm gonna put some butter on it and just spread it around.

Wow, I'm literally drooling in my mouth,

oh that looks so good!

I mean, it's butter, and it's warm and toasty.

This has to be good.

Okay, this might be one of my favorite hacks yet.

This is so good!

It's like that perfect crunch on the outside

and the soft sweetness on the inside and it is perfect.

This was super fun, I'm so glad

that we got to test out all these hacks today.

I hope you guys try out the ones that worked

and other than that, I'll see you guys next time.

(upbeat music)