I intended to make banana bread on Saturday. I turned on the (gas) oven to preheat as I made the batter, and when it came time to put the batter in the oven I found that the oven was not hot. The flame won’t light, and it will be a few days until building maintenance can come by and see what’s wrong.
I’ve got banana bread batter (with raw eggs) sitting in my refridgerator, waiting impatiently to be baked.
Can I bake it in the microwave? I would think not, but perhaps one of you knows better?
Otherwise, how long will the batter last before I have to throw it out?
The raw batter has been sitting in your fridge since Saturday? Me, I’d throw it out and start over–raw eggs mixed into things are very problematic to store. Also, whatever chemical leavening you used (baking soda or baking powder) has almost certainly lost its fizz by now.
I’ve never tried it, but I’ll take a guess. You know how a microwave cooks food more or less uniformly, inside and out? Well, you don’t want that with bread. Baking from the outside in is, I think, what forms the crust (even banana bread has a crust to some extent). Without a crust forming, I suspect that you would lose the little bubbles in the bread, and it’d go flat.
I seem to recall being served cornbread in a skillet at one time. I imagine you’d have to cover the pan to keep in the heat, but if the skillet warms evenly it shouldn’t be a problem.
Come to think of it, you could also do it on the stove, if you have a heavy cast-iron pan with a fitting cast-iron lid (this is called a Dutch oven). If it were outdoors on a campfire, then you’d also want to pile coals on top of the lid, but that’s probably not an option.
Probably the best solution, though, is to head over to a neighbor’s house and borrow their oven. This also guarantees that you won’t have leftover bread.
Here’s what I’m going to do – as Duck Duck Goose says, the batter should probably be tossed, esp. since it’s now 4 days old. So I’m going to try cooking it in the microwave, just to see how it turns out. If it works, I can make new batter and make a loaf of bread for keeps.
Something similar happened to me; I made a batch of sundried tomato bread, well, that is I made the dough, proved it, knocked it back, proved it again and when I came to bake it - Fzzt! the oven died on me.
I could have simply frozen the dough (on thawing, it needs knocking back and proving again), but I took small pieces of it, rolled it out very thin and cooked then one at a time in a cast iron pan - because they were leavened, they puffed up like naan breads and they were very good.
If it had been a cake mix, I’d probably have added a little more milk (to make it just runny enough to pour from a ladle), then fried it as pancakes.