Brown Butter Banana Bread

If you come across some enfeebled, spotty bananas, but you don't have time to throw down a quickbread then and there it's simple enough to toss them into a freezer. But always, always peel them first.

I haven't made banana bread in a while in part because the last time I did, I tried to use bananas that had been frozen in their skins. I made a valiant effort at separating the stringy black mess from the pale yellow mess, but in the end the whole thing smelled (and tasted) sadly of rot.

Happily, today was unlike that day.

Brown Butter Banana Bread
adapted from Simply Recipes

4 ripe bananas
1/3 cup butter
3/4 cup sugar

1 tbsp ground flax seeds
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.

Melt the butter in a saucepan or skillet. Once everything is liquid, reduce the heat and begin to stir, gently at first, and then with an increasing sense of urgency. The butter will lighten, and then darken, turning a nutty brown color.

Once it's brown, pour the butter out of the pan into a small bowl where it can cool until needed.

Mash the bananas in a large mixing bowl. Add the warm (but not hot) brown butter. Mix in sugar, vanilla and flax. Sprinkle the baking soda and salt on of the mixture and stir a few times. Add the flour, stirring just until incorporated.

Pour the thick batter into a baking pan (this will do a short bundt, 9 inch round, or a 4 x 8 inch loaf pan) and bake for about an hour. The cake is done when a knife inserted in the center pulls out clean.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Biscotti

I am strangely lazy when it comes to twice-baked goods. Give me fiddly little dough shapes to make, or chocolate dipped whathaveyou, and I'm happy to work away at it for a couple of unreasonably focused hours. But biscotti and shortbread both require a discomfiting combination of sporadic attention and accurate timing.



This biscotti isn't particularly traditional--I used both baking powder and soda, and the recipe doesn't have any ground nuts in it. What it does have is a deep chocolate flavor. (You can taste the peanut butter on the inhale of a bite, but it's not overpowering) And, importantly, this recipe withstood my haphazard baking rhythm.



Chocolate Peanut Butter Biscotti

Ingredients:
3 large eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup chocolate peanut butter (or nutella, or regular peanut butter)
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
2 1/4 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup chocolate chips

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Beat eggs until frothy. Add sugar. Add peanut butter in by hand mixing. Combine (sift together) flour, baking soda and powder and salt. Mix. Add chocolate chips.


Form the dough into two or three logs, and place them on a parchment paper covered baking sheet. Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes, then pull the sheet from the oven, and reduce the temperature to 200. Using a serrated knife, slice the logs into biscotti shaped pieces. This may be difficult. I got through it by pretending I was a jigsaw machine. Lay each piece on its side.

Bake again (at 300 now) for 10-15 minutes. Stay on the short end of the baking time on this and the next step to create biscotti that retains a softer center.

Pull the sheet from the oven, flip all the pieces and bake again for 10-15 minutes.

Done. These are best enjoyed with a hot beverage and a long dunk.

Simple Italian Cookies

I narrowly missed getting doored by two flower delivery vans on the way in to work this morning, so it must be valentine's day. In honor of the occasion, I pulled together a batch of simple italian cookies--sometimes called Italian Love Knots.

I usually refer to these as cookie-biscuits. The dough isn't very sweet, and the cookies are firm a little dry. They get their sweetness from a citrus glaze that dries to a hard finish. I've made the glaze with lemon juice and orange zest in the past, and that's what I recommend, but I went with orange juice for this glaze. When you include the zest, it'll be visible in the glaze.

Simple Italian Cookies

1/4 cup butter (salted), softened

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 tsp orange extract

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1 egg

1 egg white

1 1/2 cups flour (all-purpose)

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

Glaze:

Lemon Juice

Powdered Sugar

the zest of one orange

Directions:

Preheat the Oven to 350 Degrees F.

Mix the butter, sugar and extracts. Add in the egg and egg white. In another bowl (or your measuring cup) mix the flour and baking powder. Add the dry to wet, and mix until the dough comes together--it'll look crumbly, but it'll come together in the next step.

Pick up shooter marble sized pieces of dough and roll them between your palms until you have a long snake of dough. Knot the dough in any manner you please (suggestions include: pretzel, knot, heart, spiral) and place on a lined baking sheet.

Bake for 8-10 minutes. The top will be light, and the bottom will be slightly browned.

For the Glaze- Start out with two cups of powdered sugar, and add lemon juice by the teaspoon, mixing thoroughly after each addition, until you get a runny glaze. Add orange zest and mix. Wait for the cookies to cool before dipping them if you want a thicker glaze layer. If you're fine with a thin layer, dip while hot.

Crispy Mint Creme Cookies

I'm not sure how this happened. I was trying to bake a simple chocolate crinkle cookie base for a chocolate topped cookie that has a thin mint layer. But I ended up with something that looked and felt disappointingly like a full size version of cookie crisp cereal pieces--light and crispy where I was banking on having dark, rich, and chewy.

They didn't turn out bad. Just... not quite what I was looking for. On the bright side, the mint creme layer was brilliant. When I did this, I ended up with double the mint creme I needed, so I've adjusted the recipe below.

Mint Creme
(from Gourmet's peppermint patties recipe)

1 1/4 cups confectioner’s sugar

3/4 T Karo Syrup (or golden syrup)

3/4 T water

1/4 tsp peppermint extract

1/2 T shortening

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl, until they come together into a clumpy mess. Turn the bowl over onto a counter (preferably wax paper covered) and knead until the creme comes together. In its final form, it'll look almost like a marshmallow. (But it feels like fondant.)

Set it aside.

Crispy Cookies

Your mileage may vary here. I'm still not entirely sure what I did. But this is some kind of Mangled version of these, from Betty Crocker.

1/4	cup vegetable oil
2	oz unsweetened baking chocolate, melted, cooled
1	cup granulated sugar
1	teaspoons vanilla
2	eggs
1	cup all-purpose flour
1	teaspoon baking powder
1/4	teaspoon salt
8 oz	milk chocolate (for finishing)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F

Mix the oil, chocolate, sugar and vanilla. Add in eggs, one at a time, while mixing. Add in the flour, baking powder and salt. Once the dough starts to come together (mine never stopped containing grainy lumps of chocolate, go figure) chill the dough for as long as your patience will allow. For me, that's about 10 minutes, while I clean up ingredients and preheat the oven.

Once the dough is chilled, you can roll it into goopy ball-shapes and drop onto a parchment lined cookie sheet. Don't fret if the dough doesn't roll well. It will spread and smooth in the oven.

Bake for about 10 minutes--until the edges start to brown.

While the cookies bake, form small patties of mint creme. These will go on top of each cookie. You can form a pat by rolling a ball, and pressing down with the palm of your hand.

Once the cookies are out of the oven, press a mint creme patty on the top of each cookie, and wait for the cookie to cool.

Once cool, drizzle or drape chocolate across the top, sealing the mint and cookie together.

I ran out of milk chocolate before I was finished, and I ended up making the last dozen into mint creme cookie sandwiches. Here's what the chocolate-covered version looks like, in cross section:

Peanut Butter Blossom Buttons

Peanut butter blossoms--those nutty, chewy, cookies with a hershey kiss pressed into the top--have always been one of my favorite cookies. Unfortunately, they're also one of the hardest to pack up into a tupperware container and transport. The delicate tips of the kisses get knocked right off.

So it's time for a new take on the peanut butter blossom.

Meet the Peanut Butter Blossom Button.

Peanut Butter Blossom Buttons

(adapted from Hershey's)

Ingredients

Hershey Kisses (one per cookie)

3/4 cup peanut butter

1/2 cup shortening

1/3 cup sugar

1/3 cup dark brown sugar

1 egg

2 tablespoons milk

1 teaspoon baking soda

1.5 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

Demura sugar (for rolling)

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees F.

Beat the shortening and peanut butter in a medium mixing bowl until you can't see the white of the shortening. Add the white and brown sugars, and beat again until the mixture gets a little fluffy.

Add the egg, milk and vanilla.

Stir together Flour, baking soda and salt (I usually just do this in the liquid measuring cup. Saves on dishes) and add to the wet ingredients. Mix until the dough comes together.

At this point, pull out your mini muffin tin. Take pinches of the cookie dough and roll them into 1-inch(ish) balls. Gently roll the balls in the demura sugar, and pop each ball into a hollow on your mini muffin tin. No need to line it or grease the tin, the sugar should keep the cookies from sticking.

Bake for about 10 minutes. While the cookies are baking, unwrap the chocolates (one kiss per cookie). When you can see cracks form in the tops of the cookies, pull it from the oven. Press a kiss, point down, into each cookie. Once you've finished them all, go back and give each kiss a gentle tap to push it down a little further and cement the two together.

Put the pan back in the oven for another minute or so, then remove. Wait for the cookies to cool before tipping them out of the pan, so that you don't muss the chocolate. Or, if you're in a hurry or short on pans, you can use a butter knife to pop them out and let them cool on a baking tray or paper towel.

Wait for the cookie to cool completely before you pack it up.

Honestly, I think these look more like blossoms (think tulips) than the original ever did.

My recipe made about 42 cookies. Your calorie content may vary slightly, but here's how it came out for me.

A few specific notes:

Normal grocery store peanut butter works just fine for these. I used all-natural, fresh-ground, still warm, peanut butter purchased at my local organic hipstermart. But the shelf stable stuff is great too. Creamy will guarantee a perfect cookie, in my opinion, but you can use crunchy if you don't mind a little extra work while mixing.

And speaking of crunchy, I do recommend picking up some of the demura sugar--sometimes sold as raw sugar. It gives the cookies a rough texture that contrasts with the smooth chocolate.