Some lovely folks from this Canadian company, Brien, sent me a nice sampling of their maple products among which was this bag of granulated maple sugar. Made from maple syrup, I looks like plain sugar granules, but slightly caramel in color and made from maple, duh. As soon as I saw it in the box, I knew exactly what I wanted to make it with. Now, you know I don’t plug products or brands here, but because I’ve never heard of maple sugar and you might be interested on how to get it, I wanted to give you a link to the company. They were lovely in sending me a free box of goodies to check out and I’m thrilled they did – because I would have never known about them otherwise.

Bourbon Banana Bread with Maple Sugar

Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 tsp freshly grated or ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
8 tbsp (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup maple sugar
2 large eggs
3 overripe bananas, mashed (about 1 1/2 cups)
1/4 cup sour cream, or plain yogurt or well-shaken buttermilk
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 tbsp bourbon
1 cup fresh cranberries (you can buy them in November and freeze and use throughout the year, or Whole Foods sells them year-round in the frozen fruit section)

Preparation:

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Spray a loaf pan with vegetable spray or lightly oil.

Stir the flour, baking powder, baking soda, nutmeg, and salt together in a large bowl.

In a separate medium bowl, beat the butter and sugar together with an electric mixer on high speed until light and creamy. Beat in the eggs, bananas, sour cream, vanilla and bourbon and stir to mix well.

Add the flour mixture to the butter-sugar mixture and stir just until the flour is moist and no longer visible. Avoid over-mixing. Gently stir in cranberries to incorporate.

Scoop the batter out into the baking pan and smooth out the top. Bake around 40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the bread comes out clean.

Let the bread cool on a cooling rack for 15 minutes. Eat warm, or at room temperature. Personally, I think warm is the way to go, but that’s just me.