Tis the Season - Durian Galore

It's durian season again. I am surrounded by durian lovers - my father and my father0in-law (FIL) are avid durian lovers.
So chances of multiple durian sessions are inevitable during this period of time.

My dad picked up durian picking off some forrest in the vicinity last couple of years and during the season of the spikey fruit, he will have a bountiful harvest.
However, as these durians are not farmed, there is a high chance that these durians pulps are not that great, meaning to say they may be not too ripe and lack the creamy and rich taste. When this happens we try to make some derivatives from these pulps.

Since I have recently developed a love for baking, I decide to make a durian quickbread to "get rid" of them. I used the Banana Quickbread recipe and replace the banana with durian. But alas, the mashed durian pulp proved to be too much and I used too much in the 20cm square pan that the whole cake ended up too dense. There were still leftover durian so I baked another with a tube pan.

Surprisingly, there was a lack of durian fragrance during the baking which I anticipated. But overall, this durian quickbread was very dense and moist and tasted like almost like those brown durian paste (in stick form) pple get from the stores. And this is a taste that I do not take to. So I guess I will not be in a hurry to bake this again.

Another baking failure......

Banana Quickbread

The same day I made the healthful muffins, I proceeded to make this loaf of Banana Quickbread.

I got the recipe from Happy Home Baking, a baking site that I frequent due to the detail instructions from the author.

This was really quick and simple to make. I could not get any over-ripe bananas so I just went to NTUC and bough some ripe looking bananas. My MIL later told me that I shoulg get those that are small in size as those will taste better and have a strong aroma to the baked products.

Mr HB says that these tasted very bland and that the texture of the loaf is really coarse. But I think the taste is ok, packed with banana flavour and moist enough though the texture is really full of holes.