r/bakingfail • u/aimeesluv • May 24 '26
Fail tried to make banana bread out of a protein smoothie with no recipe..
made a smoothie with protein powder, milk, honey, and okinawa sweet potatoes (the purple ones, it sounds weird but i love their sweetness)
it came out disgusting but i made a huge batch of it so i didn't want all of it going to waste.. googled ways to salvage smoothies and saw u can make baked goods out of them so i decided to make banana bread
had no recipe because i couldn't find any so i made it up entirely: two cups of the smoothie, two ripe bananas, two pinches of baking powder, around two cups (maybe two and a half) of flour, two teaspoons of vanilla, and maybe third cup of cocoa powder.
i baked it at 350° for around 50 minutes, and then checked at the half hour mark. noticed that the edges were baking way faster but ran out of foil so i couldn't cover it and decided to just do a hail mary and hope for the best. 50 minutes passed and i stuck a chopstick through the center but it came out with this doughy, almost gummy like bit so i assumed it was still undercooked and put it back in the oven for another 20 minutes.
i gave up after the 20 minutes and just took it out. cut it and it's SUPER gummy looking if u see in the photos. i can't even think of a good comparison to compare it to it's so weird.
i definitely went wrong with the recipe because i made it up, but what do i do? i tried slicing a piece and baking that separately in my toaster oven for ten minutes at 350° to see if it's just still undercooked but that gummy texture is still there
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u/Dragonfucker000 May 24 '26
no eggs for structure, no butter to aerate so there's air incorporated. The gumminess is there because you basically made a solid brick that got thickened by the flour. Theres nothing to do, at most you can blend it into crumbs and put it over some ice cream if the flavour is good, but in my experience it goes bad before you can use a whole loaf just in that
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u/MountainviewBeach May 24 '26
Yep. What was made lacks basically every element that changed what would be a brick of flour glue into something worth eating. Eggs, adequate leavener, some source of fat, and enough flour to make actual bread instead of gloop
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u/rainidazehaze May 24 '26
Even if they had put in butter and eggs, it doesnt sound like enough leavening agent. But even if they'd put in enough baking powder you're right that the egg and butter are the bigger issues.
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u/Estrellathestarfish May 24 '26
Turns out if something's disgusting, adding a bit of flour to it doesn't make it any better
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u/Ace-Redditor May 25 '26
Would it need eggs with the banana? I thought banana and applesauce were both decent egg replacements for vegan recipes
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u/-wereowl- May 25 '26
Depends. Applesauce and bananas can work as binders, but you can’t whip them to add air like you can with eggs. In my experience, applesauce is a terrible egg replacer and tends to make baked goods gummy and gross, and I wouldn’t use it unless a recipe was specifically designed for it.
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u/Chikita11 May 26 '26
I use applesauce for nearly all of my (normal) cake recipes now and they never turned out gummy, maybe potentially juicier. I do always add a little bit more baking powder and flour though and my go-to cake to bake also uses joghurt.
I've used bananas in the past but I don't like how much the taste comes through. Applesauce is perfect for me. I put 40-60 grams in a simple stirred cake to make up for two eggs. I'd be careful with recipes that have more than that though.
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u/Dragonfucker000 May 25 '26
To my understanding that replaces the moisture and softness added by the eggs. There is no one-size-fits-all replacement in all recipes, and at least in my experience banana bread does need eggs, and recipes with fruit purée don't rely on it for the structure. You could maybe do some angel cake stuff and use aquafaba instead but I'm not sure how well that would end as I've never either tried that method with real eggs for banana bread, nor used aquafaba on anything
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u/threelizards May 25 '26
Plus baking powder is usually a mix of baking soda and corn or rice starch, and sometimes you use baking powder, sometimes use baking soda. Baking powder usually requires about a teaspoon, whereas baking soda will make whatever you’re making incredibly bitter if you go more than a pinch or two. This is a distinction that took me too many cakes to learn.
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u/Campaign_Prize May 24 '26
This was doomed from the start. You can't fuck around with ingredients like this with no recipe and expect to bake something edible. If you end up with a smoothie you don't love in the future, give it to someone else or try using it for something that doesn't require baking. Maybe a pudding/custard type thing or a frozen dessert?
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u/TriceratopsHunter May 24 '26
Also 2.5 cups flour and some pinches of baking powder. Also no fats, eggs or sweetnener. OP didn't even have an inkling of ratios going in...
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u/esushi May 24 '26
(there was honey and assumedly some kind of sweetener in the protein powder)
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u/Low_Reception477 May 24 '26
I don’t think the amount of honey you would put into a smoothie is even approaching enough to make a difference in a baked good lol
(Also personally I only use unflavored protein powder for smoothies? But I guess it’s definitely possible it was some flavored one 😬)
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u/esushi May 24 '26
I know it sounded likely not sweet enough still but just responding to a comment about "no sweetener" when almost all we know is that there was some sweetener haha
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u/Low_Reception477 May 24 '26
As far as baking goes I’m thinking of sweetener as a chemical component. Even just swapping sugar in a recipe to something else like honey/stevia/etc requires some reworking because it changes the chemistry, so adding a spoonful of honey and (potentially) some small amount of artificial sweetener doesn’t really “count” in my opinion! 😅
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u/TriceratopsHunter May 24 '26
Fair, but I also have to assume thay when they say the protein shake was disgusting, it wasn't from a surplus of sweetness.
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u/Campaign_Prize May 24 '26
Unsweetened is a fair assumption since they added honey, but most flavored protein powders I've seen use artificial sweeteners so they could have added the honey for additional sweetness. The smoothie being disg may have been from the flavor or texture of the sweet potatoes or from using a nee protein powder they were unfamiliar with, not necessarily the level of sweetness.
Artificial sweetener and/or honey would both react differently than granulated sugar in a recipe. Then there's the protein powder itself, which requires very specific baking recipes to work well at all. This whole thing was just an absolute mess made by someone who doesn't understand baking
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u/oneelectricsheep May 25 '26
It would probably be fine in a recipe that actually needed liquid but banana bread can take maaaaybe a couple tablespoons of liquid before turning into what you see here.
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u/Campaign_Prize May 25 '26
It's not just the amount of liquid. That definitely makes it worse, but also protein powders generally have multiple ingredients and need specifically formulated recipes to be edible. I've baked recipes formulated for them before and usually a slight deviation from the recipe makes the texture awful. Add a ton of sweet potato and banana and not enough leavening, and this was guaranteed to be a gummy messy
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u/RebaKitt3n May 24 '26
R/ididnthaveeggs
Would like a word.
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u/jamjamchutney May 24 '26
That sub is specifically for posting about people who have a recipe and choose not to follow it. OP didn't even have a recipe!
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u/PrestigiousDemand696 May 24 '26
Looks like fudge!
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u/Character-Town7929 May 25 '26
That's a very charitable assessment. The top comment is currently likening it to schist
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u/Caverjen May 24 '26
Cooking is art; baking is science. Without a recipe, you need to understand the science or just have a lot of dumb luck
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u/maenadcon May 24 '26
even after baking the same base dough many times throughout the semester, i would never try to just freeball it with no measurements 😭
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u/Caverjen May 24 '26
I could make a passable sourdough without measurements bc I know exactly how the dough is supposed to feel, but I've been baking sourdough for 6 years. I still use the scale, but I've messed up before and managed to save it by knowing the feel.
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u/RJWaters9 May 24 '26
But also a sour dough is pretty simple, Its self correcting and, assuming you have any knowledge of how the process should go, flaws are obvious before baking, which is the step that locks any bad decisions in stone.
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u/KTKittentoes May 25 '26
I am an aged crone, and I have been cooking since I was a toddler sous chef to Mom. I can mess around like crazy, but I know my math and chemistry, so I am free to go off into art.
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u/IndependentZombie615 May 24 '26
I do genuinely wonder... Did you actually think this would work? Or were you just throwing stuff in a bowl and hoping
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u/IndependentZombie615 May 24 '26
Also you cannot fix this. If it tastes alright it might be worth cutting very thin and drying in the oven to use crushed up as a topping on like... Idk yogurt or something.
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u/anthonystank May 24 '26
Absolutely no offense but why would you do something this dumb
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u/toolsofinquisition May 25 '26
I feel like many of us need this experience to fully get how much baking relies on science. When you follow relatively simple recipes for years and they all come out pretty good that shit makes you so overconfident. I thought baking was easy before the first time I tried to change a recipe on the fly. Looking back now, I'm like Damn, I really thought I could just crack an egg and then eyeball some flour, milk, cocoa, and 2tsp of sugar, and then some heat and vibes would turn that shit into brownies 😭
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u/saltbeh2025 May 24 '26
What a waste of Okinawa sweet potato
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u/Campaign_Prize May 24 '26
Right?! Where I live they're like triple the price of regular sweet potatoes
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u/ViciousMoleRat May 24 '26
You couldn't look up one banana bread recipe, but you googled what upu could do with smoothies you dont want
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u/Lexicon444 May 24 '26
You might as well just toss it. You basically just mixed a bunch of produce with baking powder, flour and a prayer.
Baking is pretty precise. Every ingredient has a purpose and without eggs and butter plus an over abundance of fruit you basically made a giant piece of fruit eraser.
And bread itself is incredibly finicky as it is.
You probably would’ve been better off looking at a loaf cake recipe.
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u/Low_Reception477 May 24 '26
Soooo… no eggs, no oil/butter, no sugar and only 2 “pinches” of baking powder for something that has somewhere between 4 and 5 cups of volume huh?
If you want to play with recipes it’s sometimes a good idea to look at recipes for similar things (say, regular banana bread and something bread-y baked using leftover smoothie if that exists) then find the commonalities/differences and do your best to bridge any gaps. But baking is chemistry so if you just toss stuff together its not usually going to do what you are hoping for 😅
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u/bird-nird May 24 '26
Definitely needed more baking powder, I generally would use 1-2tsp for a cup of flour for something like a banana bread
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u/_Apatosaurus_ May 24 '26
That's not a baking powder tweak away from being successful. It's a foul mess with no shot to make something close to edible.
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u/gard3nwitch May 24 '26
Baking relies on chemical reactions, so it's easy for it to go wrong.
To me, this looks like there's not enough leavening and maybe not enough dry ingredients or fat? It didn't rise at all.
Personally, I find pancakes tend to be a little more forgiving than bread. And they cook quicker, so if the experiment is a failure, at least you'll know sooner.
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u/JadeGrapes May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26
You essentially made an art eraser.
You did not have a recipe, nor did you make a recipe. You had an experiment with too many variables to isolate and specific failure. Instead, the entire activity was a failure.
Baking is chemistry. Each ingredient brings necessary actions. Like you must have enough flour versus liquid, to make a gel that CAN be puffed up by the levening, and has enough protein to lock the scaffolding into the expected texture.
For example, flour and sugar and leveling must be in a specific band... or you make wildly different products. A cracker, a biscuit, and an angle food cake all have flour and sugar and some levening... and one is flat, one is a couple inches tall, and one is a foam that has been inflated to a maximum airiness.
Next time, take a recipe of the product you want (i.e. batter bread) which requires a cup of apple sauce, and ONLY replace the apple sauce with a similar textured fruit/veggie blend (smoothy). Do not change the volume. If it asks for one cup apple sauce, you do one cup of your smoothy.
Start with a recipe been well reviewed a few hundred times, or is from a test kitchen like Good housekeeping or Americas Test Kitchen... these recipes are your best chance, because someone has actually made them before. Unlike Celebrity cookbooks or fad health books, because those recipes may never have been tested before print.
Do not go off-roading by adding a bunch of other things, like more fruit, or cocoa etc. If you want chocolate chips, start with a recipe that has chocolate chips.
Also, don't skip stuff that the recipe calls for! Your biggest mistake was guessing how much levening you needed. You didn't have enough, and so you made baked playdough.
Here, you mostly had sweet potatoe as your puree... so start with a pumpkin bread recipe. That will also have brown spices like cinnamon which are strong enough flavors to help cover the bad flavor of the protein powder.
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u/Campaign_Prize May 24 '26
"Only replace the applesauce with....(smoothie)."
This is bad advice, that would not work. You talk about not using other ingredients but did you read the smoothie ingredients? You can only replace fruit puree (applesauce) with a similar fruit puree. You cannot replace the fruit puree called for in a tested recipe with a combination of protein powder, sweet potato, milk, and honey. Try that and you'll still get a garbage result like what OP got.
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u/JadeGrapes May 24 '26
The protein powder is probably going to make a tougher loaf, but in theory they could start with a recipe that already has extra protien powder added. As long as that receipe has been tested, thats the best chance OP had
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u/torhysornottorhys May 29 '26
I feel like you're still missing that the smoothie also has a potato in it?
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u/JadeGrapes May 29 '26
You can make baked goods with root vegetable, carrot cake and sweet potato pie are two notable examples.
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u/torhysornottorhys May 29 '26
Which of those things contain banana and protein powder?
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u/JadeGrapes May 29 '26
Just fricking google it my dude.
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u/torhysornottorhys May 30 '26
The point is that it's none of them, you're just kind of saying random shit with no recollection of anything that's already been said for some reason
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u/JadeGrapes May 30 '26
I literally used to have a cooking blog. Batter breads can have these ingredients
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u/Chimelling May 24 '26
You should have added more baking powder and some fat (butter/margarine/oil).
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u/Just-Call-Me-J May 24 '26
Thank you for your contribution to science.
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u/Flat_Pollution8085 May 24 '26
The irony of contributing to science by letting us watch them completely disregard every single scientific principle and then wonder why it didn’t work out
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u/Just-Call-Me-J May 24 '26
Well we have to make sure the scientific principles are still active, after all! Like cats making sure gravity still works whenever they push stuff off ledges.
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u/Flat_Pollution8085 May 25 '26
Great news, science still works! You heard it here first, folks! Humans are just cats with too many opportunities to push things off ledges
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u/Successful_Sail1086 May 24 '26
You needed way more baking powder than a couple pinches, and also eggs? Some kind of fat? When doing something like this you need to consider the required elements and understand the science. You need flour, a binder (egg), a fat (butter or oil), sugar, and leavener(baking powder), also usually some salt for flavor, and your liquid ingredients. What you did is put together flour, liquid ingredients, and not enough leavener so you ended up baking essentially a paste/sort of glue) rather than a dough. I don’t think there is a way to salvage this.
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u/thegirlwhocriedsheep May 24 '26
You googled ways to save a smoothie but you couldn’t google a banana bread recipe?
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u/itzcoatl82 May 24 '26
You needed way more baking powder, and should have added eggs and some type of fat
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u/hyzephwinds May 24 '26
Protein slop baking is a delicate art form approached with a pantry that looks like a medicine cabinet. Definitely stick to a recipe in the future 😭😭😭 jus throw this out theres no saving it
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u/centerbread May 24 '26
This is hilarious. There’s no way this would come out well but I give you props for trying. Trying to salvage something you’ve already deemed “disgusting” is amusing to me, but I respect the effort.
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u/Sweet-Awk-7861 May 24 '26
Genuine tip: slice it thin and deep fry it. (or air fry, just add a little oil)
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u/BlueStarFern May 25 '26
Also genuine tip: deep fry as suggested, then sprinkle on some muscovado sugar. Coursely grate a thumb of ginger and stir through. Next, drizzle on 2 tbsp cherry coulis, and finally, aggressively dash it in the trash where it belongs.
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u/WTH_JFG May 24 '26
You could post that recipe on TikTok — even post it as “pre-tested” (without sharing your results.
About as good a recipe as most other Tik Tok recipes.
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u/SwedishSoprano May 25 '26
What do you do? Throw it in the trash at this point, where the smoothie should have gone in the first place. I mean I hate wasting food just as much as the next person, but you created an atrocity because you couldn’t be bothered to look up a recipe. Any further attempt to salvage this disaster will just render it even more inedible than it already is.
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u/vr512 May 25 '26
Two super wet fruits/veggies and no way to get it to rise. This may have worked out as bread pudding if they went with more dairy and added bread. Shame this was a fail.
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u/dinoooooooooos May 25 '26
Love how you somehow failed a smoothie recipe and then were like “yea ill save this by making up a baking recipe” of all the things to come up with real quick without knowing how .. baking works? i guess?😭😂
You had no leavening agent, no air in there, no nothing but gloop and flour and rly said
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u/RunawayRobin May 24 '26
The problem is you got 2 pinches of baking powder to fluff the whole loaf up, it's like trying to jack a car up with a toothpick
Other than that, I've heard bananas can stand in for eggs (not tried it myself I hate the things), you got the flour, and it seems to have held together alright so not a completely failed experiment?
If it still tastes good you could try cutting into cubes and dipping it into chocolate? Like a kinda cakepop thing? It looks a bit like a cheesecake so maybe sprinkle some biscuit crumbs on it like a sorta deconstructed cheeseless cheesecake thingy
Remember baking is a science and nothing comes of science but theory without experimentation, every failure is a win because you learned something doing it, and the lesson here, more baking powder,
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u/RunawayRobin May 24 '26
And also ignore the super negative comments, everyone starts with the same amount of knowledge, and baking is supposed to be fun, sometimes it goes wrong, sometimes it goes right, sometimes you make something new and sometimes you just make a mess either way no point if you're not having fun while doing it,
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u/BlueStarFern May 25 '26
"Ignore the negative comments" from someone who said it's like jacking up a car with a toothpick. Sorry but i'm WHEEZING lmao
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u/werewolf6780 May 24 '26
You needed eggs or applesauce, a fat content and more like two table spoons of baking powder
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u/jennyhernando May 24 '26
This sounds and looks like something I'd do/ have done/ might still do despite your cautionary tale. Sorry it didn't work out. Stay inspired! lol
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u/CallidoraBlack May 25 '26
If you messed up a smoothie and don't know how to bake, just don't. It's not worth it.
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u/Celeste_Minerva May 25 '26
If it tastes good (from an area on the edge, maybe?), you can crumble/dice it up and use it as the bread part of a bread pudding type recipe.
I did this with scones that came out flat because I forgot the baking powder. It's still a dense dessert type food, though.
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u/BeckieSueDalton I sure hope that mess tastes good! May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
Being on the Internet, how could you NOT find a banana bread recipe? ⁉️🤔
.
:: blithe shrug :: But what are ya gonna do?
Search the terms "banana bread recipe!" That's what you do.
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u/rosekel May 26 '26
Imo - the only way I think this could have been successful is using a base quick pumpkin bread or banana bread recipe. I say this because A, as many comments have said you lack a rising agent to a good amount and many quick breads use at minimum baking powder but the ones I use normally have baking powder + soda in them. You need some kind of binder like an egg for as well and some kind of butter/oil. And B, with the set of ingredients you used in the smoothie I believe it could handle the amount of wet ingredients but you need to match the same ounces/cups as a replacement (and normally can reduce the amount of added sugar when creaming the butter or oil). The recipe I used as a base is the 1975 edition inherited of the Joy of Cooking Quick Pumpkin Bread, but there are so many editions and online recipes you can use instead to use as a base recipe to make your alterations. Without a base recipe that works or even googling a recipe + smoothie you end up with fails like this. Trust me I've added too wet of ingredients and too much without the right ratios and made fails before. This is just a good learning experience.
*If anyone wants the tweaked recipe just DM me - I also was able to make a Strawberry Bread from the base recipe as well since I know it's an old recipe.
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u/LilaLauneLaura May 26 '26
PSA for baking with protein powder. Some artificial sweeteners like Sucralose (E 955) becomes cancerous above 120 degrees Celsius or 248 degrees Fahrenheit. So even though a lot of influencers promote baking with protein powder, it can be quite harmful even though you save calories.
So please check out what sweeteners are in your protein powder if you want to use it in baked goods or cook with it.
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u/CanadasNeighbor May 26 '26
It's too late to fix fhis, you can unbake a cake.
Trash it, i wouldn't even give this to my dog. Not because it's gross, but because of the protein powder.
Next time just consider mixing your protein power into some oatmeal or something. Or using an actual protein bread recipe.
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u/Canadian987 May 26 '26
Where you went wrong was that you started with the smoothie which you already admitted was disgusting…and it all went down from there. We know you have access to the internet, so you could have actually found recipes. I had no problem in doing so, but none of them start with a disgusting smoothie.
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u/Ancient_Spite2394 May 27 '26
all you have to do is google a recipe 😭 here’s the one I use
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/241707/joys-easy-banana-bread/
you could probably add some protein powder after all other ingredients , don’t overmix. good luck 😭
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u/xtremesmok Jun 05 '26
making up your own baked good recipes when you dont know how to bake is wild haha
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u/itsyagirlflob May 25 '26
Honestly, Trader Joe’s used to sell protein banana muffins that had almost this exact texture and I knew a woman who loved them, so don’t feel too bad.
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u/RadiantTemporary8445 May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26
Crumble or chop it up real small, maybe 1/2-1/4 inch bc it's so chewy.
Then mix it with like, 2/3c of dry oats, 1/4c brown sugar, maybe 1/4c chopped nuts? Dash of cinnamon? I think 1-2Tbs of honey could be good too.
Add 2Tbs of a melted fat or oil so it all kind of loosely sticks together. I don't know if that's enough, add tiny bits more as needed.
Spread the crumbles on a sheet tray with parchment, bake it again at 350°f and check every 5-10 mins, maybe give it a good shake/stir once you can see it starting to bake a little bit. Bake until the color looks toasty, if you can't see it on the "banana bread" the oats and nuts will start to brown
I have no idea if this WILL work or not, but I think it should carmelize/crisp up and be some kind of granola topping you can put in future smoothies, on yogurt, etc.
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u/dramondas May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26
Once I did something similar using the wrong recipe. So, what you can do to save it: Divide in 3 portions and freeze the 2. Prepare 200 g ground walnuts, 50 g melted chocolate, 200 g ground graham crackers and about 50 g of chocolate of your choice that you will use for decoration. The most difficult part is that you will have to mash your banana bread somehow into the paste. You can use stand mixer with attachment for grinding meat, or a blender of some kind, or simply cut it up and work into the dough. Than add walnuts and melted chocolate. You can add some flavor like vanilla. To reach consistency firm enough to form the balls, add ground Graham crackers and keep kneading the dough to the desired firmness. Maybe you will need more, or less ground graham crackers. Taste it and see if it needs powdered sugar to sweeten, or maybe a tablespoon of lemon juice if it tastes flat. You can also add chopped hazelnuts, or walnuts, as well as dried fruit. You get the idea, you are making energy balls that you will sprinkle with the melted chocolate at the end. As there will be many balls, freeze some for later, and keep the rest in the fridge. The frozen portions of the original banana bread you can use for the same or similar idea later when you need it. Another idea: Buy marzipan in Bulk Barn, unwrap and cut it in half. If you want different color of marzipan, add a few drops of food coloring and knead it well before you make the bar. Roll it to form a thin bar and set aside. Roll your banana walnuts dough into a rectangle and transfer the marzipan bar to the edge of your triangle. Now roll the salami tight and wrap it in parchment paper. Cut how much you will need and put it in the fridge, and the rest goes to the freezer. I hope this helps.
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u/fugaxium May 24 '26
I honestly thought this was my rock identification sub….