This Shit is Bananas

For the last twenty years – at least! – I have eaten a minimum of one banana every day. I freaking love the things. I thus also love anything that tastes like banana – from muffins straight through to medicine. Naturally, as a banana aficionado, I’m always on the lookout for the best banana bread recipes.

When my friend Colleen, thus, had a Banana Bread Bakeoff Bonanza with some friends, I was intrigued. I was even more so when her loaf was crowned the winner, and she shared the award-winning recipe!

Colleen’s Bonanza Banana Bread

• 1C mashed bananas (this amounts to about 4-5 average sized fruit)
• 1C white sugar
• 3/16C oil
• 1/2C light sour cream (she vows that it must be light – not sure why, but despite my aversion to low-fat/calorie anything, I obeyed!)
• 2 eggs
• 1t vanilla
• 1.5C all purpose flour
• 1t baking powder
• 1t baking soda
• 1/2t salt
• 1/2C walnuts/pecans/chocolate chips

Set your oven to 325F and generously grease a loaf pan. Combine everything from bananas through vanilla in a delicious bowl of wet-ingredient goodness, and combine your dry goods separately. Mix ‘em all together – the whole process takes no more than five minutes, I swear.

Add the nuts or chocolate chips last – I personally find that chocolate ruins a perfectly heavenly banana bread, so I opt for nuts every time. I would’ve chosen pecans, but I only had walnuts in the house. (An edit: in my second batch of this, I tried to use 1C whole wheat flour and 1/2C white flour and I can’t figure out if it was that or the fact that maybe I put too much banana, instead relying on a quick fruit count, but it was less perfect than the first. The middle never really cooked, despite the fact that I put it in for an extra forty minutes. Bah!)

Bake for 45-60 minutes (my oven required 55). The top will crack lightly when it’s done. Eat or freeze – and beware doing the former entirely before the latter can happen!

Buttercream Ratios

So for some reason, I have never made a perfect buttercream frosting. It agitates me – it seems like such a simple thing, but I never get the butter/milk ratio quite right. My perfectionism wants the ideal ratio!

My friend Melissa (whose amazing-looking chocolate mint cupcakes are featured above) vows that this is the premium combination, thus I am storing the information for future reference. She actually uses milk, but another friend just pointed out to me that it’s cream that makes a perfect buttercream (um, how on earth has this never occurred to me?) so I’ve modified slightly for my records.

• 1C butter, beaten (ooh, another thing I’ve never done!)
• 4C powdered sugar
• 1/4C heavy cream
• Vanilla/other extract to taste

I’ll test this out in the next round of baking that requires frosty deliciousness!

Holiday Blondies

There is nothing so happiness-inducing as the beginning of holiday baking – and I got mine started tonight. I realize it’s only late November, and I don’t typically start ’til mid-December, but with a kid on the way, I want to make sure I get things done while I still can!

Every year, Chatelaine (yes, again, I will note how much I love this magazine) dedicates a section to holiday baking in an efficient way, sharing base recipes that can be quickly modified to make a variety of different options. Today, I decided to take their blondies recipe, double it up, and go for the most holiday-friendly variety.

Chocolatey-Cherry Blondies

• 1C butter
• 2C sugar
• 2.5C flour
• 1/2t  salt
• 2 eggs
• 4t vanilla
• 2C glacé cherries (red, green, or a mixture)
• 1C dark chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350F and spray a rectangular cake pan. (You can, of course, go back to half size here and do two 8″ pans, but I was in a doubling mood.) In one bowl, cream together your butter and sugar. In another, whisk together flour and salt. Combine these two bowls and mix.

You can use your stand mixer here if you like, but I sometimes just prefer doing things by hand – brings me back to the kid days. Once those are creamed together, throw in your eggs and vanilla and make sure the batter is nicely mixed.

A note here: the quality of extracts you use is often the differentiating point between good baking and heavenly baking, so please do yourself a favour: splurge on your vanilla!

I put the cherries in the blender at this point, but I think in future, I would just chop the cherries – the blender turned it kind of into a mostly-red mixture, but whatev. Include your chocolate chips, spread in the pan, and bake for an hour.

These blondies are ultra-chewy and quite fantastic-tasting, so – despite not being one of my traditional holiday favourites – I am pretty pleased with the result, even if they’re not totally themey-looking. Chatelaine suggests drizzling melted chocolate over the top to make things festive, but I fear that that wouldn’t freeze well, so I’ll probably just do either that or a super-thin glaze-type icing for drizzling when I thaw them. Finally, next time I’d probably replace the chocolate chips with toffee bits and keep the pecans. These would’ve done well with some nut action. Hah.

So what should I make next?

Baby Steps

So the bathroom renovation is done but for a minor patch-job on the wall where the plumbers had to make some changes due to ongoing vanity/sink issues (don’t get me started), but I can’t get pictures yet as we have way too much to finish before this kid arrives.

Like what?

Oh, just his adorable room. The hallway floors. A second floor banister. The staircase to the third floor. That kind of thing.

Anyway, I love this shot of the staircase reno in progress – you’re seeing behind the stairs what will be the baby room closet. The room itself couldn’t be properly closed up ’til the staircase was redone. And we had to get custom treads made, because they don’t make them thick like they did 150 years ago, so there was waiting and deliberating and sizing and shimming and gluing, but it’s nearly there!

The poor husband is working like a total maniac to try to get things finished. I, in the meantime, am staying still like a maniac in hopes that this kid arrives late enough that we can get things done!

Sunday Sugar Rush

This morning, despite the fact that it’s a Sunday, I was up and at ‘em at 7:30AM. If you know me at all, you know how weird this is. I am not a morning person. I will never, ever get up before 9AM unless I am required to do so by work, appointments, or yoga class (which, let’s face it, might as well not even exist at this point given my inability to work out, but that’s another story). In any case, I was all energy and joy, doing laundry and tidying and reading crap on the internet.

And this morning, my most awesome friend and B-dos partner-in-crime Angela was also in an energized weekend mood – and had posted that she was baking muffins.

A perfect activity for a sunny Sunday, no? I slightly modified the recipe she’d posted and these were the results!

Sunday Sugar Rush Muffins

• 2C flour
• 1/2C white sugar
• 3t baking powder
• 1/2t salt
• 1/2C semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 1/2C toffee chips
• 3/4C milk
• 1/4C vegetable oil
• 1 egg
• 1.5T white sugar
• 1T brown sugar

First off, heat your oven to 400F. Grease the bottoms of a dozen muffin cups or two dozen mini muffin cups – which is the direction I went this AM. So adorable!

In your main bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt, then mix well. Throw in the chocolate chips – go with mini editions if you have ‘em – and toffee chips (aka Skor bits). In a separate small bowl, whisk up your milk, oil, and egg. Slowly stir your wet stuff into the dry mix, blending carefully.

Whisk together your remaining tablespoons of sugar in a tiny bowl. Fill your muffin cups most of the way to the top, then sprinkle each wee one with the sugary mix. (It kills me that I’ve never thought to do this before! Of course this is why I love certain bakery muffins so very much – the cooked sweet stuff on the top is both darling and heavenly and I will most definitely be adding this step to future muffin recipes!)

Bake for 20-25 minutes. Et voila!

Things I loved about this recipe:

1. It took exactly as long for the oven to heat up as it did for me to both make the muffins and fill the cups. Talk about good timing!
2. It made exactly the amount of baked goodness promised. I hate it so much when a recipe gives you batter for, say, sixteen muffins. It weirds me out to put a tray in the oven with only four holes filled! I know this is a weird OCD thing, hah, but it’s so convenient when the quantities match the pan.
3. They rose perfectly! It always irritates me that my cupcakes never seem to rise enough – muffins FTW!
4. The muffins were ready in no time flat – Dave still hasn’t woken up yet!
5. Clean-up took about a minute, as it required so few dishes.

Things I’d try differently in future editions:

1. Do half white flour, half whole wheat flour. I was fully going white-bread-style this morning, but half whole wheat tends to still taste like normal baked goods while giving it a nutrition bump.
2. Add a few tablespoons of flax seeds to up the nutritional value overall – even the stuff that’s not particularly good for you can be a bit good for you!
3. Variation: Apple toffee chip muffins. Replace the chocolate chips with a chopped up apple (probably only half an apple really, whatever equates to half a cup of bits), add cinnamon and nutmeg to the dry batter, and put some cinnamon into the sugary sprinkled topping.

I am eating one now – yes, already! – and they’re a perfect Sunday morning treat. Now if only I could have coffee, my life would be complete.

Bittersweet Memories

My dad had this really lovely piece published in The Chronicle Herald this weekend. It’s about my grandparents, the navy, the legion, and Remembrance Day – super touching, sweet, and has a really great message.

I am super proud of him and hope, if you read it, you vote for and share it this Remembrance Day!