As soon as the kids started summer break we’ve had an abundance of bananas in our house. I suppose they were having a banana for breakfast in the morning when going to school, but since the last day of school the kids now sleep until noon. By the end of the week we have several slightly softened spotted bananas sitting in our fruit bowl.

There’s nothing wrong with these bananas, but my girls must think they’re rotten once they start getting spots, and they won’t touch them. By the weekend the bananas are getting brown and I’ll put them in the freezer until I’m ready to use them for baking.

I woke up Sunday morning knowing that we’ll have some kind of banana baked goods for breakfast. I already had three or four bananas in the freezer and another three soft bananas in the fruit bowl.

Right as I was getting ready to start baking the Banana Bread Scones, my youngest daughter Mackenzie sticks her head around the wall from the stairs and asks, “You need any help?’ Perfect timing because I love baking with my kids, and I know Mackenzie likes helping. In fact she does more than help. Most of the time I’m just supervising while she does all the work.

Mackenzie got to work gathering, measuring and whisking the dry ingredients, while I mashed the banana in a separate bowl. The dry ingredients consisted of flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and a little nutmeg. Once Mackenzie was done she cut up half a stick of butter and used our Pastry Blender to cut it into the flour.

I mashed up all three bananas I had on hand. The important thing is that I have a one cup of mashed banana, which I added milk, some Greek yogurt and vanilla extract.

Mackenzie chopped half a cup of walnuts (and probably ate at least another half cup), and stirred it into the flour mixture. We stirred in the banana mixture, just enough so the ingredients were incorporated. Over mixing the dough will cause the scones to be rubbery, and we didn’t want that.

We lined a dinner plate with parchment paper, sprinkled it with a little flour and rolled the dough out on top, then pat it into a disc about an inch thick. We sprinkled the top with flour and put it in the freezer for about half an hour.

When we were ready, Mackenzie and I sliced the dough into eight equal pieces, then gently pulled them apart, placing them on a parchment lined baking sheet. We baked the scones for about twenty-five minutes, until the scones were firm to the touch and golden brown on the edges.

While the scones were cooling off Mackenzie made the glaze. She combined some melted butter with milk, brown sugar and vanilla. The last thing we did was drizzle some scones with glade, and completely covered others. Sprinkled some more walnuts on top and we were done!

If you don’t have a pastry blender I would recommend getting one. This is the one I have and it’s very inexpensive. It will make it easy to combine cold butter into the flour mixture not only for this recipe, but for other pastry recipes as well.

Adapted from Cinnamon Spice and Everything Nice