Category: Cakes and Cookies

I just finished making these to bring to the meeting tomorrow. I must say, this was super yummy. I reckon anything with banana in it is yummylicious.

I used Nigella’s recipe. Well, sort of. As a shortcut, I used self-raising flour, so I saved two steps. I also added in a teaspoon of paprika powder, for added depth. And then, this is why I think it’s yummy, I used 5 whole super ripe bananas. Yums. But I did double the ingredients. OK, the recipe for these lovely muffins I made is:

Dry

1. 13/4 cups (times 2) self raising flour

2. 1 heaped tsp sea salt

3. 6 tbsp cocoa powder

4. 1 cup castor sugar

5. 1 tsp smoked paprika

Wet

1. 2 eggs

2. 1/3 (times 2) sunflower oil

3. 2 cups whole milk

4. 2 tsp vanilla essence

Mix the wet into the dry. Stir in the mashed bananas. And then fold in one packet of chocolate chips. These are best eaten warm.

 

The Source: Tyler Florence from The Food Network

The Recipe

1. 2 cups all purpose flour

2. 11/2 tsp baking powder

3. 1/2 tsp salt

4. 4 bananas

5. 3/4 cup brown sugar

6. 2 eggs

7. vanilla essence

8. 1 1/2 sticks butter (around 180g or so) melted and cooled – I zapped it in the microwave for 20 seconds or so at high

The Method

1. Mash 2 banana with a fork.

2. In a bowl, beat 2 bananas and the brown sugar with an electric mixer for 3 minutes. Add melted butter, eggs and vanilla essence. Beat well.

3. Add in the dry mixture till well incorporated.

4. Fold in the mashed bananas and walnuts.

5. Bake at 190 C till done.

The Taste

1. Moist and banana-ish.

2. Nutty

3. Not outstanding but a keeper, especially as gifts

I think I will axe Nigella’s muffin recipe. I have found a gorgeous simple recipe from my favourite ipad recipe search app. This was delicious. I brought some to work and they love it. A good recipe, no matter how bad the cook is, always works.

Recipe

1. 100g (I used more than the 85g recommended) melted butter

2. 1 cup brown sugar

3. 1 cup milk

4. 1 egg

5. 1 cup flour

6. 11/2 tsp baking powder

7. 1/2 tsp salt

8. 2 tsp cinnamon (powder)

Method

1. Whisk all the dry ingredients.

2. Whisk the milk, egg, sugar and melted butter together.

3. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ones and then whisk till well incorporated.

4. Fold in fresh blueberries.

This makes a good breakfast. Simple and delicious. Try it!

I miss you dear food blog. Sigh. As you may have noticed, I have been extremely busy. It’s the exam season and I don’t even have enough time to rest what more cook. The first weekend of school, however, I managed to whip up these healthy brownies that I actually made before at school during one of those Staff bonding sessions. I actually bought the book – The Sneaky Chef-in order to,well, sneak veggies into my picky son’s meals. It worked! He ate those brownies without realising that there were broccoli and blueberries in them. HA to you my boy! (Wait till he’s old enough to read this blog… 😦 )

Anyway, I also learnt a super healthy way to incorporate healthy ingredient even when baking. Mix equal portions of white flour, wholemeal flour and wheatgerm. The Sneaky Chef calls this “Flour Blend”. You can use this to bake cookies, cakes etc… I’m even going to use wheatgerm in place of breadcrumbs when coating meat etc. Anyway, for these brainy brownies, the dry ingredients are the flour blend, cocoa powder …erm, I can’t exactly remember the recipe. Ooooo…maybe I’ll put a link: Click here. For the purple puree: mine was blueberries + broccoli. I didn’t use spinach because we can’t really get spinach here, you know. The bayam which we are used to is not really spinach but amaranth.

They turned out great! Except for my in-laws who have a very discerning palette, the rest of us won’t even know there are veggies in them. Try it! For Home Ec kids (I know some of you still read 🙂 ) you can try this for a healthy dessert (in case your teacher calls for one!)