Yummy!
This week’s treat is very yummy banana bread. I decided to plate a few slices, garnish them with strawberries and take a few photos.
The banana bread recipe is adapted from the Fanny Farmer Pumpkin Bread recipe.
Banana Bread Recipe
1 1/2 cups (210g) flour
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 cup (200 g) sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup (1/4 L) banana purée
1/2 cup (1 dL) canola or vegetable oil
2 eggs, beaten
2 tablespoons honey
1/4 cup water
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup (1 dL) chopped walnuts (optional)
Preheat oven to 350°F (180°C). Sift together the flour, salt, sugar, and baking soda. Mash the bananas into a puree and be sure to leave it a little lumpy. Mix the banana, oil, eggs, 1/4 cup of water, honey, and cinnamon together, then combine with the dry ingredients, but do not mix too thoroughly. Stir in the nuts (optional.) Pour into a well-buttered 9x5x3 inch loaf pan.
Topping
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
Spread liberally over the banana bread dough before placing in the oven. The aroma will make you want to hurt someone!!! Bake 50-60 minutes until a thin skewer poked in the very center of the loaf comes out clean. Turn out of the pan and let cool on a rack. Makes one loaf. Can easily double the recipe.
Thanks to Bakesale Betty for her guidance and mentoring on this yummy recipe.
Updated 08/16/2017: Banana Chocolate Chip Cherry Bread: I cannot believe I posted this recipe 11 years ago. I usually make a double batch of the banana bread. Right before folding it into the pans, I add about a cup of dried cherries and chocolate chips to the mixture to make Banana Chocolate Chip Cherry Bread. It has become a big hit and I make it often. Bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes with the added moisture. Enjoy!!!
This photo was from my first night apprenticing at Bakesale Betty. My personal goal is to sharpen my baking skills. Also, this is a far cry from being a computer geek. It was a lot of work but very fun. More photos here.
My task for the evening was prepping rhubarb pies. Betty started me out cutting out dough in circles and pressing it into the pie tins. Next, I prepared the rhubarb filling which consist of 25 pounds of rhubarbs, sugar, freshly squeezed orange juice, and orange zest. I mixed the rhubarb filling in a very large steel bowl with a large paddle which was like an oar. I rowed through the mixture and poured it into the pie shells. I took a dinner break and feasted on Betty’s pasta with portobello mushrooms (very yummy!) then she showed me how to make the lattice to cover the pies. I had never made a lattice before. It was much simpler than I expected but it took me a couple of pies to get the hang of cutting away the extra dough. The final touch was brushing the lattice with cream and spreading sugar on the top of each pie. I loaded each cookie sheet of pies on the rack and placed the rack into oven. I prepped a total of 13 pies. I learned from Betty that it is not about speed but quality when baking.
Betty’s oven rack is amazing. The rack spins in the oven so the baked goods cook evenly. Here are the finished pies:
Bon appetit!
Dessert Goodness #2, originally uploaded by in2jazz.
These are photos from the 4th Annual Festival of Desserts and other holiday baking. Over 40 people stopped by for dessert during the course of the evening and I still had leftovers. Everyone had a great time and I am already thinking about this year’s festival. I did learn something important along the way. The “bake cake now and glaze later” approach will have you glazing and frosting cakes all evening.
The desserts included the following:
Chocolate Egg Nog Rum Cake, originally uploaded by in2jazz.
1 cup of butter (2 sticks)
2 cups sugar
3 cups sifted Cake Flour
3 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
1 cup eggnog (I like the Berkeley Farms Eggnog)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1 cup Myers’s dark rum
1 package of Jell-O chocolate pudding
3 heaping tablespoons of Hershey’s Cocoa
Cream butter, gradually add sugar, creaming until light and fluffy. Sift flour with baking powder and salt. Add eggs one at a time to creamed mixture, beating well after each addition. Add flour mixture alternately with eggnog and flavoring, beating after each addition until smooth. Add package of chocolate pudding, rum and cocoa and mix well together. Pour batter into a greased 12-cup bundt pan. Bake at 350º for 55 minutes. Cool in pan for 10 minutes then remove and place on wax paper and let cool before putting on the glaze.
Rum Glaze
2 sticks of butter
1/2 granulated sugar
1 cup powdered sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup Karo syrup
1 cup of rum (currently using Myers’s Dark Rum and getting rave reviews!!!)
1 tsp vanilla extract
Melt butter in saucepan until lightly boiled (do not overheat). Add powdered sugar slowly with a wire wisk then add granulated sugar. Once dissolved under low heat, add brown sugar. After the brown sugar has dissolved, add Karo syrup. Keep stirring with wire wisk. Bring to a light boil. Add rum and bring to a boil while stirring with a wisk. Remove from heat and wisk in the vanilla extract. Add more powdered sugar or use less rum for a thicker glaze.
Poke holes in the cool cake wit fork. Drizzle and brush the glaze over the cake. Continue to brush the cake with glaze that has ran down the side. Let dry and serve.
For Chocolate Rum Cake, omit the egg nog and use 1 cup of milk with the flour mixture. For Plain Rum Cake, omit the egg nog and Hershey’s Cocoa. Use Jell-O French Vanilla pudding and 1 cup of milk with the flour mixture.
Cookies
3/4 cup sugar
1 cup Land O Lakes Butter(or your favorite)
1 package(3 ounces) cream cheese, softened
1 egg
1 teaspoon peppermint extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
Glaze
1 cup semi-sweet real chocolate
1/4 cup Land O Lakes Butter
For cookies, in large mixer bowl, combine all cookie ingredients except flour. Beat at medium speed, scraping bowl often, until light and fluffy. Add flour; beat until mixed. Divide dough into halves. Wrap in waxed paper. Refrigerate until firm, at least 2 hours.
Heat oven to 375. Roll out dough on lightly floured surface to 1/4-inch thickness. Cut out with floured heart-shaped cutters. Place 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets. Bake for 7 to 10 minute, or until edges are very lightly browned. Removed immediately; cool completely.
For glaze, in small saucepan, melt chocolate and butter, stirring occasionally over low heat until melted, 4 to 6 minutes. Dip half of each heart into chocolate. Refrigerate on waxed paper-lined cookie sheet until firm. Store, covered, in refrigerator. Makes about 3 1/2 dozen cookies.
This recipe comes from the Land O Lakes Cookie Collection.
What did I learn?
The glaze was a bit of a challenge for me because I could not get it smooth enough. I used Baker’s Dipping Chocolate for dipping the cookies and it worked great. Get 3 to be on the safe side. Heat up two and pour them into one container. This way your chocolate will be deep enough to cover half your cookie.
Cream cheese is sold in 3 ounce packages but you do not see it in the stores very often so I cut 3 ounces off the 8 ounce silver brick. You can save the rest for bagels.
Cinnamon Rolls
4 1/2 – 5 C (unbleached/organic, if doable) flour
4 t active dry yeast (2 packages)
3/4 C milk
1/2 C water
1/2 C vegetable shortening (part butter — also, I use Spectrum’s non-hydrogenated shortening — it works very well)
1/2 C sugar (or rapadura, or ecocrystals, or turbinado)
1 t salt
2 eggs, room temperature
Measure 1 3/4 C flour into yr large mixer bowl. Add yeast and blend. Measure milk, water, shortening, sugar, and salt into saucepan. Blend. Heat until warm (about 120-130 degrees F).
Pour into flour/yeast mixture. Add eggs. Beat 30 seconds with electric mixer at low speed, scraping bowl constantly. Beat 3 more minutes at high speed, scraping bowl occasionally. Stop mixer.
Gradually stir in more flour (by hand) to make a soft dough. It will be rather sticky. Knead on lightly floured board or counter until nice an’ smooth, about 5-10 minutes (it’s good exercise!!). Cover with bowl or pan and let rest for 20 minutes.
Shape as desired. Here’s what I do: I cut the hunk of dough in half, roll out one of the halves until it’s flat and rectangular and large, brush it with butter, sprinkle it with a cinnamon/sugar mixture, add raisins (sometimes), and roll it up. Then I cut off the ends and cut the rest into 1″ wide slices. They usually fit nicely into 2 9″ greased cake pans. Then I put them in a warm oven (I usually warm it to 200 degrees for a few minutes, then turn it off) with a pan of hot water under them and a foil tent over them and let them rise for 40 minutes, or until doubled.
Bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes. You can ice these with powdered sugar icing (I usually do) after they’ve cooled off, but believe me when I tell you that they’re wonderful just plain and warm outta the oven. Cool them on a rack. When they’re cool, you can wrap them in foil, and freeze. Just warm them in a 250 oven for about 45 minutes and oooh boy, it’s like you just made ‘em.
Enjoy them — the recipe is from a cookbook called Homemade Bread, published by the Farm Journal people in 1969.
Powdered Sugar Glaze
1 cup of powdered sugar
1 tbl of milk
1 tsp of vanilla
Add milk and powdered sugar to get the glaze to the consistency that you desire.
What did I learn?
My dad made cinnamon rolls for us when we were kids so every now and then the thought of making them myself would pop through my brain and then disappear. I had never made anything using yeast before so I was a little nervous about how these rolls would turn out. It was much easier than I expected and I learned that working with yeast was not as terrifying as I thought. I mixed everything by hand and kneaded the dough by hand as well. As you can see in the photo above, my pan was a little crowded so I will put less in the pan next time and measure my strips of cinnamon dough a little better. Overall, I was very pleased.
Special Guest Desserts
Special thanks to Joey for the lemon squares, David for the sweet potato pies, and JS & AF for the chicken. Another big hit of the party was the hot apple cider with the mulling spices from Williams-Sonoma. A good time was had by all. I must apologize for not taking more dessert photos.
