for the dough:
for the glaze:
for the icing:
* Most easy-to-find orange blossom water brands aren’t super strong, especially if they’ve been sitting on the shelf for a while. But proceed with a little bit of caution, taste some on a piece of fruit to see how strong it is, and make sure you don’t overdo it—you might only need 1 tablespoon for the dough. Likewise for the glaze, which may only need 1/2 tablespoon + some water to dilute it. Its flavor will come through more distinctly in the glaze than in the dough.
** If you’re using active dry instead of instant yeast, mix it in with the mashed banana first so it can dissolve.
*** Using weight instead of volume gives you more consistent results when following a baking recipe. But if you don’t have a scale and need to measure with volume, no worries—just make sure you don’t add all the flour at once. Add the first 75% of it, and then slowly add the last 25%. You may not need it all, or you may need a little bit more. With this recipe, most of the moisture and flavor comes from the bananas—if you add too much flour, you can add a little bit of milk to compensate, but it will be hard to recover the flavor and it might end up tasting bland.
**** If you don’t have convection, they should take a little longer to bake, or you can slightly increase the temperature.
Storage: Like most bread, it can be kept at room temperature for less than 1 day before starting to get stale, and it will stale fastest in the refrigerator. Bread keeps much better tightly wrapped in the freezer for long term storage. If you want to make it ahead for company: Bake it (be extra careful not to over bake!), let it cool completely, wrap and freeze it as soon as it’s cool. The day you plan to serve it, thaw it in a 325°F (165°C) convection oven for about 10 minutes (until it’s thawed on the outside, and only frozen at its core) then let it coast the rest of the way and cool at room temperature, and then glaze and ice it before serving.