Banananana… You won't know when to stop with this nut bread

Over the course of time, most of my old cravings for forbidden (trigger-laden) foods have disappeared. For example, I no longer pine for strawberries every time The Bat brings home a quart of fresh ones for herself and Pop. Grapes come in and go out without my feeling the desire to pope one in my mouth and stop breathing… but breads are a much harder habit to break. 

Worse still, I have desperately missed dessert-y quick breads, like the classic banana-nut loaf which usually happened at least once a month when I was younger – after my brugly other stopped inhaling the fruits, and the occasional banana was allowed to go a little overripe. During those years, The Bat would take out the extra-long loaf pan (the 5x16 incher) and load it up with batter, filling the house with that sweet, heady aroma. If we were lucky, there would also be a brick of cream cheese on the counter when the bread was finished baking, to add a little bite, a little extra richness to the treat. But once wheat was put on my list of things to be avoided, I would glance longingly at those fruits on the counter as they started to show brown spots.

No more, though!  I can have my cake, and eat it, too. 

Welllll… technically, no. I can have my banana bread, though, and make it lower in carbs at the same time I make it wheat-free. This makes it slightly more virtuous a feast, until I slather that cream cheese all over it and treat it as if it were cupcake frosting.

Granted, it's a fairly heavy version of banana bread – Pop likes his to be a little more on the lightly cakey side, whereas this comes out dense, like a pound cake. Still, it's banana-y, nutty, and moist. What's not to like? 

Rich, nutty, fruity, and good for you…like a bran muffin, only without the whole bran muffin attitude 

 


Banana Bread with Coconut Flour

Ingredients:

7 large eggs at room temperature
3 Tablespoons honey
1/2 cup coconut oil or butter, melted
1 cup mashed ripe bananas
1 cup sifted coconut flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup chopped pecans (optional)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350° F.

Grease a standard glass loaf pan.

In a large bowl, and with Paddle attachment (not dough hook or whisk) combine eggs, honey, oil, and mashed bananas, beat until well blended.

In a separate bowl, sift together coconut flour, salt, baking powder and soda. Whisk in nuts, if you are including them. 

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet, in the mixer bowl. Mix until completely combined.

Pour into greased loaf pan, place on middle rack of oven. Bake 1 hour. 

Remove from oven, allow to cool 10 minutes in pan.  

Remove from pan,  allow to cool completely on rack.

This bread is better if allowed to stand overnight. Serve with cream cheese brought to room temperature to soften, for greater cake-like awesomeness.

Bunny Cookies

Every one in a while, I end up making food for somebody non-human, especially at Christmas time. As I've already mentioned, I made dog cookies for Pop's best friend, Clyde, as well as more bikkies for Bat's best friend's best friends…

This year, I also made bunny cookies…that is to say, treats for the bunnies in the house of my young friend Asteroidae and her family. It took a little prying to be sure what was permitted in their diet, but eventually I had a batch of decadence for lagomorphs.

Oddly enough, when it's baking, it smells good enough for people to eat…I may have to try it sometime as a basis for an energy bar, or something like it. 

Nevertheless, for the bunnies…

It began with oat flour. It ended with bliss. 

Bunny Cookies

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups oat flour (you can make your own by blending the dickens out of a couple of cups of regular – not instant – oatmeal)

1 cup fresh spinach 

1 medium carrot, finely grated

1 small apple, chopped into small pieces

1 medium banana, smooshed*

Directions:

Preheat oven to 300º F.

If you have a food processor†, combine everything but the oat flour and puree it. Add in the flour, mix well. Spread out on an oiled parchment on a cookie sheet, to about 1/4 inch (1/2 cm) thick or slightly thinner. Bake about 45 minutes, or until golden-browned on top and crusty. 

Remove from oven. Cool a few minutes, then cut into centimeter-square pieces or smaller (it will still be sticky in the middle, so you may need to use a wetted knife to cut). Spread the pieces out on the cookie sheet, place back in oven, and bake another 20 minutes, or until they are completely crusty and beginning to darken.

Remove from oven, allow to cool completely. Store in solid container, in refrigerator or cool dark place.

* I realize this is not actually a technical term used in polite cooking society, but, seriously, go ahead and smoosh your banana in its skin & then just cut or tear off the end & squeeze it out like toothpaste from a tube. Or, you can peel the banana first and then smoosh it in the dish.

†Without a food processor, I recommend using a hand-blender to puree the fruits and vegetables. Barring that, you will want to add water to the mix in a regular blender, then strain it back out using a sieve or colander lined with a coffee filter, until most of the water is removed and the mixture is thick and pasty. Once that is done, mix in the flour by hand. Or with a wooden spoon or spatula, if you prefer. It's kind of a sticky dough, so I used a silicone spatula.  

Birthday SOS! We're eating sand!

Seriously. We had a message in a bottle, and it read in large, splotchy letters, "S.O.S.*", and below, the parchment read, "*She's Older Still!"

It was the party for Asteroidea's eleventh birthday. 

For her and her brother, I've been building entertaining little cakes each year on their birthdays. If you go back through this blog, you'll find a TARDIS (with Dalek cupcakes), A sailbook with Swedish Fish-filled Jell-O seas, a marshmallow-robot-infested spaceship, a giant cheeseburger and fries, with cherry ketchup, and a circus tent filled with candies. Before I started this blog, I'd built a chocolate locomotive and coal car… and a couple more. 

I try to leave them guessing what I have planned, and then to give them something a little absurd and yet tasty. Sometimes I cheat. I use mixes and store-bought tubs of frosting when I know nobody with serious taste buds will be eating the thing (i.e, if it's for the kids' party, and I'm fixing another for the grownups of the family).

With this one, I really didn't cheat. The cake was a from-scratch banana cake, with cream cheese frosting, the "sand" was a special blend of crumbs, the shells were homemade candies, and the pebbles in the sand… okay, I cheated on those. I ordered them from Amazon. 

But I did make the punch from scratch, too. See that watermelon half? Scooped out, and all that stuff put through a blender, then mixed 2:1 with seltzer. No sugar added, and the kids gulped it down. So did most of the adults (my parents are not fans of watermelon, & I'm allergic, but everybody else had multiple cups of the stuff.)

But the cake.

The cake.

I stumbled across one of my mother's old chocolate molds, and started plotting to make seashells and a starfish cake, but somehow every way I looked at my plan, it wasn't coming together.

I had been teasing Asteroidae that planning this party was driving me bananas. Then there was this make-ahead recipe for banana cake. And then, there was this lovely post on Cake Wrecks…OY! the gears started moving.

Granted, I'm no professional. I do this stuff strictly for the romp in the kitchen, and to make a couple of kids' faces light up.  But I do try. I don't expect my cakes to look anything like the Sunday Sweets, and am happy if they look slightly better than the other things featured on Cake Wrecks' regular pages.  And eventually I accomplish what I was hoping to do.

Five little girls and one little boy consumed just about every last grain of sand. Three women and two men nibbled rocks all evening. And they all had a load of fun.

I made the candy shells and the sand well ahead. The pink sugar shells were made using the "extra strong sugar molds" recipe at the bottom of this page, but substituting strained lemon juice for the water, and, once they were hardened, they were stored in the fridge until serving. The sand, however, took finesse. I learned long ago that sand isn't really "sandy" when you look at it closely. So you can't just use plain old Nilla Wafer crumbs and think you're making realistic beach scenes. You have to add texture, color, and, mmmm flavor. So I'm including my sand recipe, below.

The structure of the cake, by the way, was built by baking two 4x9" loaves and eight cupcakes – the cupcakes being four large (Texas Muffin sized) and four small (well, standard) cups filled to just above the halfway mark, and then, after baking, stacked small upon large to form the truncated cone "towers". The loaves were sliced lengthwise and crosswise, then their corners trimmed at an angle so they could nest around the cupcake "towers". When you do your own version, you'll find this initially requires improvisation.

Once you have all the components gathered and ready to assemble, frost them, build the castle, and cover with pebbles, shells, and, finally, the sand. Lots and lots of sand.

Edible sand

Ingredients:

1 Tablespoon almond bark (or, if you prefer, white chocolate)
2 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
2 or 3 dark chocolate wafer cookies (like Oreos w/o the cream filling), ground to fine crumbs (but NOT to dust)
3 Tablespoons brown sugar
3-5 Tablespoons yellow-colored decorating sugar
1-2 Tablespoon red-colored decorating sugar
1 Tablespoon green-colored decorating sugar
1 teaspoon blue-colored decorating sugar
5 Tablespoons regular granulated sugar

Directions:

In a microwave oven, melt the almond bark on a notebook-sized sheet of waxed paper or parchment. Using a butter knife or spreading spatula, spread the almond bark as thinly as possible. Put into freezer.

Combine other ingredients, either in a blender or using a medium bowl and a whisk.

Remove almond bark from freezer and, while still very cold, break or chop into fine chunks and crumbs. Mix into bowl with other ingredients. Put in storage container, seal, and refrigerate until you need to use it.

Button, Button, Who's Baked the Buttons?

My young friend Asteroidea came over, with her younger brother, for the afternoon.  And, while the boy wanted nothing but peanut butter and honey sandwiches, of which he ate copiously, she was inclined to cook a plateful of her new favorite easy treat, banana pancake buttons.

These are astonishingly simple to prepare: mash a very ripe  medium banana until it becomes a smooth paste, thoroughly mix in one medium to large egg, and fry in lightly-buttered nonstick pan over medium heat, turning once when bubbles start to appear along the edges.  (They're very tender, and flipping is sometimes tricky, so always keep them "button-sized," about 2 - 3 inches across, by dropping them onto the pan using a tablespoon or soup spoon). They're very sweet on their own, so they need no topping, but Asteroidea indicated they were very tasty with a tiny bit of cinnamon sugar sprinkled on them, if you want a little extra kick.

Still, I'd promised that today would be a day for baking, so when she finished with the pancakes, we started in on the spice buttons (a variation on a German holiday cookie, the Speculatius – spiced windmill cookies – of which my father is deeply fond). These are freezer cookies, so you don't just mix them up and throw them into the oven. It took a whole afternoon of waiting, first.

In the end, they are similar to ginger snaps, and, if you want, you can boost the amount of ginger and chili powder to make them more zippy, but these are quite addictive enough. Also, when the holidays roll around, these are durable enough to ship, as well as to poke a hole or two in them before baking, so you can string them up with ribbons or licorice strings/red vine candy, as decorations on a Christmas tree.

This is a small sample of what she took home with her, so nobody in our house would be too tempted (toothpick included for scale).

Spice Buttons

Ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 Tablespoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly-grated nutmeg

1/8 teaspoon ground cloves

1/8 teaspoon chili powder

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1/2 cup tightly packed brown sugar

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1 large egg, room temperature

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 large egg white

sanding or decorative sugar

Directions:

In a medium bowl, sift or whisk flour, salt, and spices. Set aside.

In a separate medium mixing bowl, mix butter on medium speed until smooth, about 2 minutes. Add both sugars, beat at medium speed until creamy, about 3 minutes, then add vanilla and egg, mixing until slightly fluffy. Reduce the speed to low, gradually add in dry ingredients and mix well.

Scrape dough from the bowl, divide into thirds. 

Roll each portion of dough out to an average diameter of about 1 to 1 1/2 inches (it will make a roll about a foot long). Wrap tightly in plastic and place in freezer. If you want to prevent it from getting a flat bottom, slide each dough roll into a cardboard tube (an old, clean paper towel roll will do) before you put it into the freezer.

Allow to chill at least three hours.

Once the dough is chilled stiff, place oven racks near top and bottom of oven, and preheat to 375º F.  When the oven is nearly hot, prepare egg white by lightly beating it in a small bowl. Have ready a large cookie sheet covered with either a prepared silicone non-stick sheet or a sheet of cooking parchment.  

Remove a roll of cookie dough from the freezer and carefully unwrap it from the plastic (if you want the edges of the cookie to be precise and smooth, you may want to roll it again just a little). Brush lightly with egg white, then sprinkle on decorative sugar, all the way around.* 

With a thin, sharp knife or a wire cheese slicer, cut dough off in 1/4 inch (or slightly thinner) slices, place close together on the cookie sheets (they will not grow much bigger, since the only leavening is the egg). 

Bake 8 - 12 minutes, until the cookies are browned to your preference in crispness. Cool on rack, if you can stand to wait that long before eating them all.** 

Makes over 100.

 *This step is optional. Pop likes his cookies plain and simple, without extra sugars or icings, because you can eat them almost immediately out of the oven without worrying about the hot sugar burning the roof of your mouth. 

** If, on the other hand, you like lots of sugar, you can make a thick, stiff icing for these, using 2 cups confectioner's (powdered) sugar and 7 teaspoons of warm water (you can bump it up a notch with 1/8 tsp. or so of cinnamon, but don't get crazy).  Mix completely, put into a zippered bag, cut a small piece off a corner off the bag, and pipe the icing onto each cookie, starting by drawing a perimeter, then filling in the circle. Once you have it iced, you can further decorate with colored sugars, sprinkles, or dragees, if that's your style.  Allow at least a half hour for the icing to set up before serving these.